Remove Watchadzfree Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Watchadzfree pop-up alerts may appear unexpectedly, covering the subject of the page you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Watchadzfree promotion can result in the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Watchadzfree popups removal in various manners, and also inspecting your PC for additional viruses presence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Watchadzfree 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 Watchadzfree pop-ups?

Watchadzfree popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a sort of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which creates a substantial amount of profit for adware suppliers. These advertisements may consist of sometimes shocking content, or have a link to malicious content/website, since adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Watchadzfree push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-priced and also very effective marketing solution¹. It permits the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she visited earlier with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this possibility and get it. Considering the exceptionally low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing instrument is a favorite thing among the advertising teams of big internet retail stores.

Nevertheless, such a successful plan could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the targets of malware invasion is a perfect basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup promotions. And Watchadzfree.com promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short details for the Watchadzfree site

How have I got the Watchadzfree virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that lead to the Watchadzfree popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware may likewise be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is presented as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of people regularly use the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these types of programs are risky, since it is very simple to build in a Watchadzfree malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Watchadzfree popup virus may likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the odd web page. Such sites are generally packed with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors often approve any promotions to be posted on their web page. Hence, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can additionally receive something far more hazardous, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

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

Potentially undesirable programs, like Watchadzfree popup virus may cause a variety of different troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups can display you the advertisements, where you are offered to get another unknown program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed under the last motto. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also exploited as a spreading method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these promotions, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

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

The guide of Watchadzfree adware elimination contains 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards repair the results of its action. The removal process is very simple, since it may be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, because of its large resources usage, along with some failures that can be serious for some kinds of individuals, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. Additionally, a variety of trojan viruses are capable to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to use the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven security tool that will undoubtedly erase the malware from your personal computer and create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Watchadzfree adware first.

Removing Watchadzfree 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 Watchadzfree 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 web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file named “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text³:

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.

However, there is one problem that makes the things much more difficult to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware versions that are used to show you the Watchadzfree pop-up ads are changing the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the typical, until you attempt to open settings once more.

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 Watchadzfree Pop-ups?

Name: Watchadzfree

Description: Watchadzfree - 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 Watchadzfree.com push notifications?” or “why do Watchadzfree.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Watchadzfree 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 ads 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.