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

Here is a screenshot on the tot.coolides.com pop-up from my machine:

If this description sounds like your experience, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pop up the tot.coolides.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the tot.coolides.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but here we go: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been observing the behaviour on these systems 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 downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the tot.coolides.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

tot.coolides.com was created on 2014-11-23. tot.coolides.com resolves to the 208.43.241.245 address.

So, how do you remove the tot.coolides.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the tot.coolides.com ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and Browser Warden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the tot.coolides.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. I know this since the pop-up ad had a label with the adware name: “Ads by BockAndSurf“.

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

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 NewPlayer, CheckMeUp and Salus can also be responsible for the tot.coolides.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 tot.coolides.com ads removal:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also check the add-ons that you have in your browser. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that does not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

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 tot.coolides.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thanks!

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

Thank you!