Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from ppvguru.com while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise with pop-ups. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the ppvguru.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the ppvguru.com pop-up from my system when it showed up in a new tab:

If you also see this on your computer, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the ppvguru.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the ppvguru.com pop-up in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from your computer.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but here we go: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing the actions on these computers to see what kinds of ads 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 ppvguru.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

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

It seems as ppvguru.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

The issue with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the ppvguru.com pop-up ads you need to check your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Review what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you installed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t solve the problem, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

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

Thank you!