Yesterday evening, my niece came to me with her latest problem – she had installed some video software and after that all the web browser search engines changed to Yahoo!, the home page changed to Yahoo! and new advertisements started to popup from everywhere. The software she downloaded was “Any Video Converter” and after quick look through its installation process, you can see that it tried to download unwanted software in your computer during the install. On the PC of my niece, it had downloaded and installed ByteForce Anti-malware and Yahoo! Powered – both of them useless and unwanted software.
So this is how you can remove Yahoo! Powered from your computer:
- Press Win+R hotkey, type regedit.exe and press Enter. In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.
- Check all the subkeys until you find the DisplayName as Yahoo! Powered in the right pane. Note the uninstall string to find the location where “Yahoo! Powered” is installed in your PC. In General, it is installed inside a sub-folder in the C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ folder. In my case, it turned out to be C:\Users\Trish\AppData\Local\{87DEB182-A376-DD3A-CEEE-F8D2EA86044A}.
- Open the folder that you found in the above steps and you will see another sub-folder named HowToRemove inside which you can see detailed instruction about how you can remove the search engine and homepage settings for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. These instructions are valid and can be used to set the default homepage and search engines.
- Delete the folder that you found in the step 2 above.
- Download Avast Browser Cleanup and use it to restore all the browser settings back to default and remove any plugins or extensions that might have been installed without your permission.
- Scan your computer for possible infections using free online scanners like ESET Online Scanner.
- Open Control Panel → Programs and Features and try removing “Yahoo! Powered”, it will result in removing the left behind entry.
I hope through these measures, you will be able to get rid of the unwanted browser hijacking adware called “Yahoo! Powered”.