Remove hgprime.com Pop Up Ads

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

Here’s how the hgprime.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

hgprime.com pop up

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the hgprime.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the hgprime.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been monitoring the actions 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the systems. I first observed the hgprime.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

hgprime.com was registered on 2014-07-25. hgprime.com resolves to the 8.29.155.169 address.

So, how do you remove the hgprime.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the hgprime.com ads I had gosearch.me, Windows Menager, SmartComp Safe Network and Live Malware Protection installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the hgprime.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups like 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 hgprime.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the hgprime.com 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 you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Uninstall a program search

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Uninstall a program dialog

Do you see something suspicious listed 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 getting the hgprime.com pop-ups.

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

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 started develop many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually track down 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 will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties deciding if a file is legit or unwanted 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 additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

FreeFixer More Info link example
An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!