Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up advertisements from gex.coolpps.com while browsing web sites that commonly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the gex.coolpps.com pop-ups turn up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screen capture of the gex.coolpps.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my system:

Does this sounds like your story, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pop up the gex.coolpps.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you with the gex.coolpps.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the gex.coolpps.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

gex.coolpps.com resolves to 208.43.241.244. gex.coolpps.com was created on 2014-11-23.

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

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. The pop-up was labelled “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments area below.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. I think that adware such as CheckMeUp, Salus and NewPlayer can also be responsible for the gex.coolpps.com popups. And there are probably other variants too. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the gex.coolpps.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the gex.coolpps.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 dubious listed 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 getting the gex.coolpps.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up 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 you 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. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find and uninstall 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 down like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties figuring out if a file is safe or malware in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware causing pop-up ads:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the gex.coolpps.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you very much!

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

Thank you!