+ 1000.
i use the same browser and adblocker. never have any problems.
Linux + (Firefox + Adblock Plus)
I have ABP, Avast and Adguard running on opera and no popups or ads of any kind, I have them disabled here though
Same here. [but knock on wood]
XP and the latest FF here- no pop-ups or adware and never have been since I started using Glary Utilities free version. I scan on booting and on shutdown; one click cures most troubles and you can configure to prevent problems too. Best freeeware in the universe 
Phil
^ this.
Not suggesting anyone should do this, but I am curious, do microsoft still give a free legitimate copy of Win10 to users of unregistered versions of Win7? Did they even do this or was it just Internet rumour?
In my experience the best thing to do is to create and run a virtual machine on your pc. Then any malware/viruses/etc you get won’t compromise your host pc. I only run VM’s on my box and I surf and visit any site to my heart’s content 
Of course I also installed anti-virus software and patched the clients just like any other pc. Basically I treat them as a physical pc but have the ability to easily restore them.
You can get free VM software from Oracle (virual box) or VmWare (VmWare Player). Creating a Linux client is easy since there’s no license but for MicroSoft you of course need a valid license.
You need about 6GB ram and a cpu that allows virtualization.
Another thing I do is to clone my HD to another installed HD in my box. Then I can revert back to a hopefully good point just by switching 2 cables in the pc. Of course a docking station can also be used.
As someone said XP is unsupported and not a good choice to use.
Mint 17 is great, especially for us Unix programmers
There’s stuff out there that hides very effectively on Windows machines.
I tried for a month to clean up a very customized virtual machine used for a job, a couple of years ago, before finally giving up and recreating it from scratch.
The adware crap on it was able to disassemble itself to hide from scans and wait a week or two then reassemble itself.
Figured it out with all of the above — Malwarebytes, AdAware, some of the malware tracking and fixing sites — and went through many steps with smart help trying to clean it all out.
But like many others with that sort of thing, eventually, starting from scratch was the only answer.
I gather now there’s crap that can even survive a format, as it writes itself to places outside the file system that aren’t formatted.
Btw, there is malware that can can infect your host PC from your VM.
Best Regards,
George
Yikes Streamer, that’s a bummer. It’s definitely a malware infection on your local computer. I would most emphatically never subject users to that trash.
But until you do a reinstall make you sure don’t do any kind of online purchases or login to your bank account or important email accounts, because you almost surely have some more insidious malware on there that will phone home and steal your passwords or even your identity.
And his family jewels. 
It’s not BLF, it;s you.
sure but the risk is much less than running a non-virtualized system.
I hear that and was surely aware beforehand, but will definitely not log in to any important accounts. Thanks for the warning.
Streamer, you might want to use AdwCleaner.
It's freeware and it gets rid of a lot of bad stuff pretty quickly.
Yeh RC thanks for that. But no matter how I get it cleaned up I can never trust this OS again for important stuff. Will be using wifes stuff for important transactions. 
>:-/ ya think?
I updated to that latest version ^ just now
Raccoon city
Wow…AdwCleaner just cleaned/wiped out a butt load of crapola…