Did you just get a pop-up from freeupdate.thenewupdater.com and ponder where it came from? Did the thenewupdater.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 thenewupdater.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 freeupdate.thenewupdater.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer suggesting that I should install a “new Flash Player”.

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the thenewupdater.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the freeupdate.thenewupdater.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. I have been following 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 computers. I first observed the freeupdate.thenewupdater.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

freeupdate.thenewupdater.com was registered on 2015-01-30. thenewupdater.com resolves to 104.28.14.113 IP and so does freeupdate.thenewupdater.com.

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

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

To remove the freeupdate.thenewupdater.com pop-up ads you need to review your system 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 freeupdate.thenewupdater.com pop-ups is to examine the software 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:

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 something was installed about the same time as you started observing the freeupdate.thenewupdater.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu 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 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 locked 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 determining if a file is clean or malware in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!