Remove swedishmethod.com Pop Up Ads

Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from swedishmethod.com while browsing web sites that mostl of the time don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to circumvent the built-in popup blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the swedishmethod.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

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

swedishmethod.com popup

If you also see this on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the swedishmethod.com ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the swedishmethod.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been following the behaviour on these machines 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the swedishmethod.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

swedishmethod.com resolves to 104.27.130.234.

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

The problem with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the swedishmethod.com pop-up ads you need to review your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

  1. Examine 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 review the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
  3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your computer. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

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

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the swedishmethod.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!