Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from pc.onlineupgradeonline.com about a “new Flash Player”, while browsing on websites that commonly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screen capture on the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com pop-up from my computer:

Does this sound like your experience, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab computers and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been monitoring the behaviour 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, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

pc.onlineupgradeonline.com was created on 2015-01-08. pc.onlineupgradeonline.com resolves to the 199.115.114.52 address.

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

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

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com ads removal:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you have in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

Did this blog post help you to remove the pc.onlineupgradeonline.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!