Did you just get a pop-up from newfree.checkupdatenow.com and wonder where it came from? Did the newfree.checkupdatenow.com ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the checkupdatenow.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s a screenshot of the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

If this description sounds like your experience, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the checkupdatenow.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the web site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-up in this blog post.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the actions 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

newfree.checkupdatenow.com was created on 2015-01-30. newfree.checkupdatenow.com resolves to 104.28.16.117 and so does checkupdatenow.com.

So, how do you remove the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the newfree.checkupdatenow.com ads I had PriceLess, PriceHorse, OfferBoulevard and SpeedCheck installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in .

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the newfree.checkupdatenow.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find 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 suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started getting the newfree.checkupdatenow.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify 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 found 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time determining if a file is safe or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more 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 you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the newfree.checkupdatenow.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!

Update 2015-02-07: The checksoft2upgrade.checkupdatenow.com subdomain is also used: