WinFixer is a computer program that claims to have the ability to repair any computer system problem. However, due to its regular displaying of popup notifications, dubious installation (installing itself without the user’s permission), and advertisements of other products, WinFixer is generally regarded as a bogus adware program. The popup ads display insistent notifications to convince the user that something may be amiss with the computer, and WinFixer will be able to fix it, for a price.

Due to these problems, WinFixer could possibly be spyware or malware; no authoritative determination has yet been made. However, its misleading popups and forced downloads mirror the “marketing” strategies of many spyware programs. Some computers infected with this program do exhibit sluggish performance.

WinFixer’s claim:

WinFixer 2005 is useful utility to scan and fix any system, registry and hard drive errors. It ensures system stability and performance, frees wasted hard drive space and recovers damaged Word, Excel, music and video files.

In reality, WinFixer doesn’t do any of these things.

Links

Note

Most of these websites are selling products to remove WinFixer. If you intend to buy any of these products, including the well known ones (Norton and McAfee), do research on the products to make sure that they are effective and legitimate. In addition, if you prefer to remove the software yourself, please use the utmost caution when editing the registry values.

Links

• McAfee’s Entry on WinFixer
• Symantec’s Entry on WinFixer and removal instructions
• Spyware Guide’s spyware database entry on WinFixer
• WinFixer Removal Solution from Spyware Database And Removal Instructions
• Information about WinFixer from CounterSpy
• More Removal Instructions from Spyware Removal Guide
• 2-Spyware.com’s entry on WinFixer
• WinFixer/Vundo Relation
• WinFixer Virus Manual Removal - Vundo Variant
• Sysinternals’s Process Explorer

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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