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

Here’s a screenshot of the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

If you also see this on your system, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org ads. So don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, the ads are probably not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll try help you with the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org removal in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but here we go: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-up on one of these lab computers.

checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org resolves to the 207.244.83.9 IP address. checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org was created on 2015-02-20.

Update 2015-05-04: I’ve also see the getupgrade.safesystemupgrade.org (62.210.93.163) in use:

So, how do you remove the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

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.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-up ads you need to examine your computer 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 checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find 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 strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started seeing the checksoft.safesystemupgrade.org pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to find 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool designed to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 difficulties determining if a file is safe or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional 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 pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!