Severe Weather Alerts ads

[CaroleF]

For about a week or so I have suddenly had these stupid ads appear at the bottom of the screen - a black arrow on a green background. I discovered they were from Severe weather alerts. I googled this and found that it's a spam type thing and all sorts of solutions to getting rid of it were given. As these all seem to include downloading a different programme I didn't want to do this. I then went through the programmes on my computer and deleted the one with that name. However, the ads still continued. Now I am not computer literate, so I don't know exactly what I did but I went looking for other lists of progammes on the computer and came up with the same thing listed - Severe Weather Alerts. I deleted this and so far I haven't been bothered - for about 2 days now, no sign of it.

How do these things get onto the computer and is there anything I can do - or even not do - to prevent it happening again. It obviously wasn't detected by Norton as a threat although according to some reports I read via Google it was listed as a virus. Any ideas welcome.

Carole

[qbman1]

These things can be easily picked up from e-mails or web browsing. You can download free tools to deal with adware and such like. I use CCleaner and SuperAntiSpyware which I run regularly to clean and remove any such niggles.

Hope this helps

[david63]

The most common reason as to why you get these types of things is that you have downloaded something from the Internet and/or it has been installed along with something else. Another possibility is that it installed itself, either automatically or when you clicked on something, when visiting another site.

How to stop then is a difficult one as they can be quite intrusive and will bypass most computer protection software and, in some cases, getting rid of them can be virtually impossible.

Installing a ad blocker on your browser will probably stop them appearing but that will not stop them getting installed in the first place.

[Meg 50]

although you have deleted the programme - praps you need to delete your cookies and temp internet files as well. then reboot the computer.

also try typing in the title in the search on the 'start button' and delete every reference to it - they hang on tenaciously