Did you just get a pop-up from sam.coolaideas.com and ponder where it came from? Did the sam.coolaideas.com 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 sam.coolaideas.com pop up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the sam.coolaideas.com ad looked like on my system:

Sometimes the pop-up redirect me to ad124m.adk2.net, and got stuck there without showing any advert. Sometimes it redirected me to adcash.com, which then redirected me to other web sites where the actual ad was shown.

If you also see this on your system, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the sam.coolaideas.com ads. Don’t flame the people that owns the website you were at, the ads are apparently not coming from that site, but from the adware that’s installed on your machine. I’ll try help you to remove the sam.coolaideas.com pop-ups in this blog post.

I found the sam.coolaideas.com pop-up on one of the lab machines where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if anything new has appeared, such as popup windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

sam.coolaideas.com resolves to the 208.43.241.240 address. sam.coolaideas.com was created on 2014-11-23. I ran the IP though YouGetSignal’s reverse whois service, and it listed the following domains on the same IP:

• control.staticlyrics.com
• dss.drivefor.net
• fms.diveunsuredeputy.com
• gir.driveropti.net
• gym.macpath.net
• hwt.foreignsign.com
• jco.mappre.net
• jdn.opendone.net
• jzn.toolopen.net
• rou.resyncload.net
• rsb.coolideaso.com
• unp.staticlib.net

So, how do you remove the sam.coolaideas.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the sam.coolaideas.com ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the sam.coolaideas.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 issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. I think that adware such as Salus, CheckMeUp, NewPlayer and SaferSurf can also be responsible for the sam.coolaideas.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.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the sam.coolaideas.com pop-up ads you need to review your machine 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 sam.coolaideas.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started observing the sam.coolaideas.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s 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 you will be able to find and uninstall 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. It’s 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 a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems determining if a file is legitimate or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the sam.coolaideas.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 sam.coolaideas.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!