Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up advertisements from dvl.cooloideas.com while browsing web sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to circumvent the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

If this description sounds like your story, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pop up the dvl.cooloideas.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the dvl.cooloideas.com in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

dvl.cooloideas.com resolves to 208.43.241.242. There’s a bunch of other domains that resolve to the same IP, thanks to YouGetSignal’s reverse IP lookup:

• article.wn.com
• businessjournaldaily.com
• control.staticlyrics.com
• enl.trepage.net
• gip.driverdiv.net
• gir.driveropti.net
• gys.mappingdo.net
• jxs.mappingjava.net
• jxw.javadrive.net
• nsl.mapticket.net
• vei.screedkeywaybrookite.com

So, how do you remove the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the dvl.cooloideas.com ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. I could see this since it was kind enough to label the pop-up ad with the adware name: “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments area.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

To remove the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-up ads you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something dubious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started getting the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to track down and remove the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess figuring out if a file is safe or adware in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware causing pop-up ads:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the dvl.cooloideas.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you!

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the dvl.cooloideas.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!