Did you just get a pop-up from checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com and ask yourself where it came from? Did the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Does this sound like what you see your system, you most likely have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the actions on these systems 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com was registered on 2016-01-26. checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com resolves to 198.7.56.114.

So, how do you remove the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com ads I had SpeedCheck, OfferBoulevard, PriceHorse and PriceLess installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Internet Explorer.

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

To remove the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-up ads you need to review your computer 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 checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.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 strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something 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. It’s a tool designed 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 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 hard time deciding if a file is clean or unwanted in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the checkupgrade24.freeupgradenow.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!