RemoveWGA

Note: Some antivirus / antispyware programs as well as web browsers flag RemoveWGA as being infected/malware, although the application is perfectly safe and does not pose a threat to your system. This is called a "false positive", used when anti-malware tools wrongly classify an innocuous (inoffensive) file as a virus. The incorrect detection may be due to heuristics or to an incorrect virus signature in a database. Similar problems can occur with anti-Trojan or anti-spyware tools.

RemoveWGA is a little tool designed to remove the intentionally-deployed Windows Genuine Advanced (WGA) Notification, which means it could make things a little bit quieter for your computer by disabling repetitive balloon messages and popup alerts triggered by this Microsoft tool.

This is a Windows update flagged as "Important" and could pose a security risk as it opens a connection to Microsoft's servers every time the files are loaded. Evidently, since WGA is no longer shipped with newer Windows, this utility is useless for Windows 8 or later versions.

The surprising thing is that the software program really works, although there's one major thing to be clarified here: RemoveWGA does not disable the validation procedure of Windows but only the notifications and the adjacent connections to Microsoft's servers.

This means that your computer's stability is not affected in any way. Nevertheless, it would have been useful if it integrated an undo operation in case you later changed your mind (although we can't see a plausible reason why you would).

The whole process is extremely easy, so our test practically came down to downloading and running the executable file. Afterwards, a computer reboot is necessary to commit modifications. On the bright side, the PC is not automatically restarted by the utility so you have plenty of time to save any ongoing projects.

A list of the files to be deleted will be presented on the screen after the restart. As far as the app's interface is concerned, everything comes down to a simple dialog that informs you whether or not the patch was successfully applied.

During our tests, everything worked pretty fine. However, we received reports from many users who encountered all kinds of problems when applying the patch. Also, if your antimalware application flagged alerts when downloading RemoveWGA, don't worry about it - it's due to its behavior: disabling a Windows component deemed as important by Microsoft (at least) is seen as irregular, malware behavior.

What we like the most is the idea behind the tool: to resolve an issue that bothers Windows users who have purchased the operating system. All things considered, RemoveWGA does a pretty good job and can help you ease the load on the system at startup by disabling the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications tool.