About: Blank is a homepage hijacker that severely slows down your computer and shows popup advertisements randomly while using one’s Internet browser. While it does not do actual damage to the computer, it does limit what can be done on the computer because, at times, the About: Blank could be using as high as 80% of the CPU’s power. Therefore, removing it is an important task.
Removing About: Blank
There are two main ways to remove About: Blank. The first is to do it the manual way. To do this, install HijackThis and Reglit.exe. The Reglit program seems to be very good at finding the About: Blank hidden file. When they are installed, open up RegLite and search for the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWindows
Within that entry, look for the key named: AppInit_DLLs. Whatever value is within this is the one that is causing all of your problems. Write down the file. For the sake of this article, we’ll call it the pesky.dll file. But, it might be any file name.
Reboot the computer and enter Recovery Console mode. Then type cd windowssystem32 and press Enter. To get rid of the read only feature that is on the file containing the About: Blank file, type:
ATTRIB -R pesky.dll
Remember that you want to replace pesky.dll with whatever file name you found. Then you are going to want to rename the file. To do this, simply write the following:
RENAME pesky.dll badfile.dll
Type exit and then hit Enter to reboot. This will effectively get rid of the About: Blank the manual way. However, you don’t have to use the manual way. There is an automatic way that can get rid of the file as well that doesn’t require as much work. By installing an Adware program such as Adware Away, the program can go in and erase the problem files for you. The best way to pick an Adware program is to do some research on the type of Adware you have. In this case, it’d important to find a program, such Adware Away, that can get rid of About: Blank.
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