Adware Cleaner, Remove Babyloon Toolbar, Other Unwanted Programs

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 17, 2012
Updated • Feb 6, 2013
Software, Windows, Windows software
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If you do not pay attention to software installation dialogs, you may end up with third party software installed on your system that you had no intention to install in first place. And even if you do pay attention, you may still end up with the software as some developers trick you into installing adware on your system.

One of the issues that you may encounter afterwards is that it may be difficulty to remove the adware and programs from your system again. We have seen lots of help requests from users who had issues removing the babylon toolbar from their PC system after it had been installed on it during a third party software installation. Even experienced users have troubles with these kind of programs from time to time.

Adware Cleaner is a free program for Windows PCs that can detect and clean different kinds of adware, toolbars, browser hijackers and other potentially undesirable programs.

A big issue with the program is that it does not ship with a readme or instructions, and that the software's French homepage is not really revealing many information as well. This means that you won't find information about the adware and toolbars that the program knows and removes. If you can live with that, you end up with an easy to use tool that can remove unwanted software almost without user interaction.

When you start the portable software after download, you are presented with three options:

  • Search - This runs a system scan and generates a report listing all the toolbars, adware and unwanted software the program can find
  • Delete - Will delete everything that it has identified during the search. You can run delete right away, but I would not advise you to do that as you may delete programs that you do not want to remove
  • Uninstall - Removes itself from the system

The reports are saved under the root c: drive where they can be opened in plain text viewers.

When you select to run delete, the program will close all but itself automatically and run the clean up operation. It will afterwards do an automatic restart of the system, and display a report on the next start of it.

Issues

The program has a few usability issues that need to be addresses.

  • The all or nothing delete option. You can't protect programs from being deleted during the cleanup. Options to select the toolbars and adware that you want to delete would be useful.
  • No backup or restoration. You can't restore what has been deleted by the program, unless you run a backup prior to starting the deletion.
  • No information. The lack of information is problematic. While you see what the program removes in the search reports, you'd probably want a list of what it can clean up prior to downloading it.

Closing Words

Adware Cleaner with its all or nothing approach has its issues, as you can with a look at the list above. The program on the other hand is effective when it comes to the cleaning of adware and toolbars that it finds on the system. I'd suggest you create a backup before you run the program to be on the safe side.

If your system is infested with unwanted software, you may want to give it a try.

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Comments

  1. Martin said on March 12, 2023 at 3:05 pm
    Reply

    An even quicker way to open Task Manager is by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc.

  2. archie bald said on March 12, 2023 at 4:32 pm
    Reply

    Win+Pause used to be the goto shortcut for me since… W95… Ms recently hijacked it and you now get Sysinfo. Device manager is still accessible this way: the second to last link at the bottom.

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