Remove Starvards Virus — How to Fix Guide

Starvards pop-up alerts can show up out of the blue, covering the post of the site you went to or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking the Starvards advertisement can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Starvards popups removal in various methods, as well as inspecting your PC for other malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Starvards manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Starvards pop-ups?

Starvards popups are an effect of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a large amount of earnings for adware suppliers. These advertisements might contain sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Starvards push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, low-cost and extremely efficient advertising tool¹. It allows the vendor to attach the buyers’ attention to their website, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to buy is provided at the online store he/she visited earlier with a 15% discount, one will surely use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing instrument is a favourite thing among the advertising teams of huge online retail stores.

However, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by malware developers. Option to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the people of malware attack is an excellent basis for malicious manipulations with the popup ads. And Starvards.com promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Starvards site

How have I got the Starvards virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting infected by the adware that cause the Starvards popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can additionally be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of users oftentimes make use of the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different utilities that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these kinds of software are dangerous, since it is extremely simple to integrate a Starvards malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Starvards popup virus may likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the strange website. Such web pages are generally packed with intense and blinking ads, and their owners typically permit any kind of promos to be published on their page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally get something much more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable programs, like Starvards popup virus may provoke a lot of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups may present you the ads, where you are offered to get another dubious program, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the use of the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also chosen as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these ads, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Starvards pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Starvards adware elimination includes 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards repair the consequences of its activity. The elimination process is really simple, due to the fact that it may be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus tool that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its large resources usage, along with some bugs that can be crucial for some kinds of users, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its use is likely impossible. In addition, various trojan viruses are capable to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven security tool that will surely exterminate the viruses from your PC and create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s deal with Starvards adware first.

Removing Starvards popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

• Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.

• Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Starvards malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps :

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option :

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original :

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions :

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information” :

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button :

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults” :

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default :

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option :


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown :

When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will definitely be connected the correct DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content³:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Nevertheless, there is one issue that makes the things a lot harder to repair, especially without the anti-malware program. Most of adware versions that are used to show you the Starvards pop-up ads are altering the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your system was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, up until you attempt to open settings once again.

Reset your browser settings with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You can see the list of the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Starvards Pop-ups?

Name: Starvards

Description: Starvards - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Starvards.com push notifications?” or “why do Starvards.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Starvards pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

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1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.