Did you just get a pop-up survey from pencilidea.xyz and wonder where it came from? Did the pencilidea.xyz ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the pencilidea.xyz pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the pencilidea.xyz survey looked like on my computer:

Does this sounds like what you are seeing, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pop up the pencilidea.xyz ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you were browsing. The adverts are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the pencilidea.xyz removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. I have been tracking the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of ads 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 machines. I first observed the pencilidea.xyz pop-up on one of these lab machines.

pencilidea.xyz resolves to the 184.73.247.179 IP address and cb2zz.rewardzone.pencilidea.xyz to 104.237.128.90.

So, how do you remove the pencilidea.xyz pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the pencilidea.xyz ads I had TinyWallet, Browser Warden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the pencilidea.xyz pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in .

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

To remove the pencilidea.xyz pop-up ads you need to examine 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 pencilidea.xyz 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 Operating System 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 shady in 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 seeing the pencilidea.xyz pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you 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 about 8 years ago. It’s a tool built to manually identify 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having troubles figuring out if a file is legit or adware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

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

Thank you!