Sound familiar? You see pop-up advertisements or pop-up surveys from survey.com-annualsurvey.info while browsing websites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the survey.com-annualsurvey.info pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the survey.com-annualsurvey.info pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

The web site has “Online Survey Center” as its slogan. The pop-up claimed to be a survey from my ISP, which I have removed from the screenshot.

Does this sound like what you see your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the survey.com-annualsurvey.info ads. So don’t blame the people that runs the website you were at, the ads are most likely not coming from that web site, but from the adware that’s running on your machine. I’ll do my best to help you remove the survey.com-annualsurvey.info pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been tracking 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 machines. I first noticed the survey.com-annualsurvey.info pop-up on one of these lab machines.

Both and survey.com-annualsurvey.info and com-annualsurvey.info resolves to the 46.166.161.6 IP address. survey.com-annualsurvey.info was registered on 2014-08-27.

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

The problem with popups like this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the survey.com-annualsurvey.info ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the survey.com-annualsurvey.info 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 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 strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the survey.com-annualsurvey.info 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 something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to track down and uninstall 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool built to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did this blog post help you to remove the survey.com-annualsurvey.info pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!