Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #277 12/31/2014


Question: How do I get Managera, Hold Page and Extutil off my PC?

Answer:

Managera, Extutil and Hold Page are extensions or add-ons to browsers that act as spyware causing lots of pop-ups and ads to appear on your machine.

Avast anti-virus detests them as bad add-ons or extensions on Chrome, but cannot remove them. If you go thru the following steps you can get them where they are not affecting anything but Avast will still see them. I have searched a computer they are on in files and the registry and have had no luck fining the residual piece Avast sees. Chrome will no longer see them after these steps so they are effectively gone but that residual marker. Hopefully Avast will have a patch soon to get rid of them.

First go in Add/Remove programs in control Panel and remove through there. You will probably only find Hold Page there, but remove it. This immediately resulted in the machine running better.

Next run a full virus scan (I would suggest a boot scan with Avast but it will take hours).

Then run a registry cleaner to get many of the residual pieces. The registry cleaner I normally use is ccleaner (it starts with a double c), although there are other good ones out there.

Next download and install Malwarebytes which is another anti-virus program. Run a full scan and it will find some pieces. Malwarebytes is available free which is version I used here, but my problem with it is that you have to pay to have a version that checks for viruses arriving on your machine. So if you use free version you are basically back to the 1990s where we could only catch viruses after infected. It is better to run in real time and stop them from getting on your machine. Then you can remove Malwarebytes. Malwarebytes says it works with most major anti-virus software.

Last if you go back in Avast browser cleanup you can tell it to ignore these extensions on chrome. This will then stop you getting warnings from Avast when you start Chrome. If you go in settings in Chrome you will see Chrome does not list these extensions as installed.

Note from last week. Comcast makes Norton antivirus available free to their subscribers

Thanks Angie for question.