This page shows how to remove hqi.slugsqueals.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Having difficulties with hqi.slugsqueals.com showing up in the lower left corner of your browser? If that is the case, you might have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine. I noticed hqi.slugsqueals.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar when doing a search at Google, but I guess hqi.slugsqueals.com can appear if you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera too.
Here are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for hqi.slugsqueals.com…
- Transferring data from hqi.slugsqueals.com…
- Looking up hqi.slugsqueals.com…
- Read hqi.slugsqueals.com
- Connected to hqi.slugsqueals.com…
If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you probably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the hqi.slugsqueals.com domain appear in your web browser. Don’t flame the people that runs the site you were at when you first spotted hqi.slugsqueals.com in the status bar. They are presumably not responsible, but from the potentially unwanted program that’s running on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you with the hqi.slugsqueals.com removal in this blog post.
Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of adverts, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional software on the machines. I first observed hqi.slugsqueals.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab systems.
hqi.slugsqueals.com resolves to the 37.58.67.154 address. hqi.slugsqueals.com was created on 2015-07-30.
So, how do you remove hqi.slugsqueals.com from your browser? On the machine where hqi.slugsqueals.com showed up in the statusbar I had Web Bar, SpeeditApp and Web United installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the web browser from loading data from hqi.slugsqueals.com.
The issue with status bar messages like this one is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.
So, what can be done? To remove hqi.slugsqueals.com you need to check your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:
The first thing I would do to remove hqi.slugsqueals.com is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find 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 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 hqi.slugsqueals.com status bar messages.
The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often show up under the add-ons menu in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to track down and remove the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually identify 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 crippled 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 a hard time determining if a file is safe or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did this blog post help you to remove hqi.slugsqueals.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!