Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from check.theinlineupdater.net while browsing at web sites that commonly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the theinlineupdater.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-up from my computer:

If this description sounds like your experience, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the theinlineupdater.net 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 with the check.theinlineupdater.net removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the actions on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-up on one of these lab machines.

check.theinlineupdater.net was created on 2015-02-19. check.theinlineupdater.net resolves to the 198.7.56.112 address.

So, how do you remove the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the check.theinlineupdater.net ads I had PriceLess, PriceFountain, PriceHorse and SpeedCheck installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Internet Explorer.

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the check.theinlineupdater.net ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 strange-looking 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 check.theinlineupdater.net pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google 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 find 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. It’s a tool designed to manually identify 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess determining if a file is clean or adware in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web 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 tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the check.theinlineupdater.net pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!