Remove ffxiv-freetrial.com Pop Up Ads About Final Fantasy Caused By Adware

Having problems with pop-ups from ffxiv-freetrial.com? If so, you may have adware installed on your machine. I got the ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-ups in Firefox, but they can appear if you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera too.

Here is a screenshot on the ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-up from my system:

ffxiv-freetrial.com pop up

It’s an advertisement for the Final Fantasy XIV game. Anyone tried the game? What do you think?

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the ffxiv-freetrial.com ads. So don’t blame the people that owns the web site 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 ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-up in this blog post. This is done by removing unwanted adware from your machine.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I have been following the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

ffxiv-freetrial.com resolves to 184.107.107.177.

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

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated 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 ffxiv-freetrial.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the ffxiv-freetrial.com 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 you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Uninstall a program search

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Uninstall a program dialog

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 something was installed about the same time as you started getting the ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
Firefox add-ons manager

I think you will be able to find 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 started develop many years ago. It’s a tool built to manually identify and remove 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 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 figuring out if a file is clean or unwanted 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 additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

FreeFixer More Info link example
An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

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

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

Update 2015-03-13: I’m still seeing the ffxiv-freetrial.com pop-ups from time to time.

Thank you!