Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up adverts from win.onlinechecknow.com while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the win.onlinechecknow.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the win.onlinechecknow.com ad looked like on my machine:

Does this sound like your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the win.onlinechecknow.com ads. Contacting the owner of the website would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you to remove the win.onlinechecknow.com pop-ups in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve 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, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the win.onlinechecknow.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

win.onlinechecknow.com resolves to 198.7.56.114. win.onlinechecknow.com was created on 2015-01-08.

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

The bad news with popups such as this one is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the win.onlinechecknow.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the win.onlinechecknow.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 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 suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the win.onlinechecknow.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware 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 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. Freefixer is a tool designed 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 a mess determining if a file is clean or adware 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 information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!