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Remove Adware in bulk with Ultra Adware Killer

Have you ever cleaned up the computer of a friend, relative or customer that was filled to the brim with adware and potentially unwanted software?

If there is lots of unwanted software installed, you are in for a long clean-up session as you need to remove programs and browser extensions, and restore system and browser settings as well.

Sometimes, it might make more sense to format the whole computer and start anew.

Ultra Adware Killer has been designed for these situations. The program may have a name that sounds like one of those rip-off tools that you buy and do nothing but that is not the case here.

It works similar to previously reviewed applications such as Adware Cleaner or Crap Killer.

It has been designed as a first response on systems that are infected with adware. It is not a one-click kind of tool as you may end up deleting software, files or settings from your system that you still need but it saves time as you can get rid of adware in bulk using it.

Just extract the program to your system after download and run it from that location. Ultra Adware Killer does not need to be installed which makes it a solid addition to troubleshooting program collections as it is portable by design.

ultra adware killer

A click on the start scan button runs a system scan for adware. The program detects and removes a variety of programs and settings classified as adware including browser toolbars, add-ons, plugins, unwanted search providers, hijacked homepages as well as software installed on the system and Registry data added by these programs.

As you can see from the screenshot above, it may find lots of different programs and files.

Note: It is recommended to close browsers before you run the program as it may do so otherwise without prompt.

Most of the entries are selected by default and while you could hit the cleanup button right away, it is highly recommended to go through the listing before you do.

The reason is simple: first, you may want to make sure that there are not any false positives. Second, it may list programs that you don't want to remove.

The adware remover makes no distinction between programs that you have installed without its adware options and programs that installed adware they shipped with on the system.

If you make sure all the time to opt-out of adware offers during installation of software, you may not require the program to take care of programs for you at all.

Besides programs, listed under file objects, you may also want to check the other tabs before you hit the cleanup button.

If you have set policies in Chrome for instance, they may be listed by the program. Firefox users should disable the prefs.js listing the program recommends to clean by default unless it has been modified by malware or adware.

A right-click displays options to select all or none of the entries which can be useful. I suggest you start with none and work your way through the list to check each item that you want removed from your system.

remove adware

The program creates a system restore point by default before the removal. While you can disable that option, it is not recommended to do so at all as it may be your only option to revert settings and programs should something go wrong.

The clean-up should not take long. What is strange though is that Ultra Adware Killer will close all open browsers even if you have not checked a single item in the browser tabs.

A click on menu in the program interface allows you to open scan and removal logs. Probably the most important bit of information you get there is that files and folders listed by the program are deleted completely from the system by it.

Verdict

Ultra Adware Killer is a handy software. It is portable and detects a wide range of adware on machines running Windows.

It is no one-click solution though even though it offers a fallback by creating system restore points prior to removing data from the system.

Information that it provides are scarce on the other hand which means that you have to manually search for information. Additional data such as creation dates, whether a folder is empty or results from services such as Virustotal would improve the usability significantly.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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