Late last year, my Mother decided to take up Microsoft's offer of a free download of Windows 10. I thought it was a great idea as well- in that it would give me another operating system to test my programs on.

Windows 10 offers a new browser, Windows Edge. Initially, I thought the excessive amount of pop-up ads was because of the new browser. So I installed every browser I could think of, including Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. The ads were not that bad with the Opera browser, however the others were just as bad as Windows Edge insofar as pop-up ads.

I looked at this problem several times over the last 3 months, always in my Mother's workspace. I mostly played around with pop-up blockers. Nothing worked.

More often than not, she booted her older Dell Windows XP Desktop rather than her newer HP Notebook w/Windows 10, explaining it was just too hard. When she declined my offer to revert the system back to Windows 8, I thought that was the end of the issue as far as I was concerned.

Then this morning, after her latest complaint, I asked her to unplug everything and let me look at it. Within an hour I found the problem, but first I tried to update settings for each browser and the "Extensions" they were using. This did not work- although at least two of the browsers showed the Strong Signal Extension installed for the browsers in question.

The short answer to the problem if you are Windows 10 literate? Uninstall the Strong Signal [your malware maybe powered by something else, the pop-ups on my Mother's system provided Strong Signal the application causing the problems] application from your system. Not from individual browsers.

Here's how if you are not Windows 10 literate. Keep in mind, when I decided to provide this graphical tutorial I had already performed the uninstall for the Strong Signal application so the illustration below shows the "Uninstall" Option using another application. If Strong Signal is your problem, the Uninstall option will be available on your system.

Again note, I researched the application "Strong Signal". There were several hits indicating others had problems with this application as well. The software allowed pop-up ads all over most browser pages running under Windows 10 on my Mother's system. Did not matter whose site. When I "Uninstalled" the application in the manner shown above-- there were no pop-up ads while using any of the popular Internet browsers installed on my Mother's system. We are both pleased about this.