Playsides - How to remove

Playsides is a game website that provides some free games in exchange to the right to display advertisements, popups or change a search provider in your browser to search.playsides.com or ask.com. This means that Playsides works as a hijacker and adware. At the very least it can be considered a potentially unwanted application.

The goal of Playsides is to earn money from advertising. While this is legitimate, search hijacking and ads are annoying in cases when the application was installed without your consent. Even if you installed it yourself, you should consider changing your search provider back because of privacy issues such as monitoring of your online behaviour and collecting the data about your Internet browsing habits. 

To avoid Playsides malware, pay attention to your downloads. Very often freeware like video players, PDF creators, etc. that can be downloaded from the Internet contain additional programs bundled to their installers. If you do not notice them marked to be activated by default, these tools can be downloaded to your computer automatically. You should always go for Custom installation and deselect any options that suggest installing extra programs. Additionally, do not allow installation from your kids accounts to prevent them from downloading adware.

You should remove Playsides from your computer if you have noticed its activity there. First, you will have to delete it from Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs list. It is recommended to uninstalling ALL programs installed on the same date as problems have appeared. Some versions of this virus install software that blocks browser settings from changing. To identify them, scanning with Spyhunter or other reputable antispyware tool might be useful. Then you can uninstall the extensions and reset settings in your browsers.

How To remove Playsides virus from Internet Explorer:

1. Click on the arrow on the right of search box.
2. Do the following: on IE8-9 choose ‘Manage Search providers’, on IE7 click ‘Change search defaults’.
3. Remove the search.playsides.com from the list.

How To remove Playsides virus from Firefox:

1. Enter “about:config” in url bar. This will open settings page.
2. Type “Keyword.url” in the search box. Right-click and reset it.
3. Type “browser.search.defaultengine” in the search box. Right-click and reset it.
4. Type “browser.search.selectedengine” in the search box. Right-click and reset it.
5. Search for ‘browser.newtab.url’. Right-click and reset. This will make sure that the search page won’t launch on every new tab.
6. If the settings revert and scans with anti-malware programs are clean: close Firefox, open file explorer and enter %AppData% in the address bar. Enter user.js in search box. If this file exists, rename it and start Firefox again. You will have to repeat the steps above.

How To remove Playsides virus from Google Chrome:

1. Click 3 horizontal lines icon on a browser toolbar.
2. Select Settings.
3. Select Basics ->Manage Search engines.
4. Remove unnecessary search engines from the list.
5. Go back to settings. On Startup choose ‘Open blank page’ (you can remove undesired pages from the set pages link too).

Automatic Malware removal tools

Manual removal