How to Remove WeatherBug?

What is WeatherBug?

WeatherBug is a weather reporting program that provides you weather data, alerting from the system tray. It’s only available for US and it provides data based on your Zipcode. International users can  get city weather datas either via Email or Rss. The publisher of WeatherBug is AWS Convergence Technologies Inc. It is created by the founder of Earth Networks company. WeatherBug is formally known as the AWS – Automated Weather Source. The weather data that is reported are the city weather conditions, local weather report, storm alert etc…It collects this data from 8500+ partnered weather stations. It has 1000+ outdoor weather webcams, and a community for people to share local weather information. It is a paid utility although it has a free version that promotes the paid version (WeatherBug Plus for $19.95). To support the free version, it has popup ads and banner ads. It also comes with AOL instant Messenger. It has an app for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Symbian and Blackberry.

Is WeatherBug a spyware?

WeatherBug doesn’t monitor or collect data or Spy your activities on the program or outside the program. So it’s not a spyware. Since its free version is ad-supported, its an adware!They let you uninstall itself from their program, onwards of Version 6.

Free Alternatives without Ads

You can get their paid version – WeatherBug Plus for weather data. As well as there are many free alternatives. The ones Cnet recommended was free and great, but got downgraded in performance and started showing Ads. Currently people are happy with Weather Exchange. You can download this from their website. You can checkout its review on Cnet here.

How to remove WeatherBug?

1. First Kill the Weather.exe process from the task manager.

To do that, press Ctrl + Alt + Del, to open up the Task Manager, locate weather.exe and terminate the process.

2. Next step is to uninstall Weather Bug from the Add/Remove program. To do that,

1. Click START.
2. Select SETTINGS and CONTROL PANEL.
3. Double click ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS.
4. Select “WeatherBug” from the list of applications.
5. Click ADD/REMOVE and follow the instructions on the Uninstallation Wizard.
6. Once uninstalled, restart the Computer.

3. Next step is to delete the registry keys.

Click Start menu, and Click Run.

In the open box, type REGEDIT to open the Windows Registry Editor.

From the registry editor, delete these keys.

For example to delete the first entry, Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER on the left panel, and then expand everything  between the “\” backslash. ie, Expand Software, Microsoft, Windows, CurrentVersion, Run. In the Run directory, search for Weather=C:\Program Files\AWS\WeatherBug\weather.exe, right click and delete this key. Similarly do the remaining entries.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Weather=C:\Program Files\AWS\WeatherBug\weather.exe
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Weather=C:\Program Files\AWS\WeatherBug\weather.exe
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AWS
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{014DA6C7-189F-421A-88CD-07CFE51CFF10}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IE4\DependantComponents\WeatherBug
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\WeatherBug

4. Next step is to delete the directory -> C:\Program Files\AWS\WeatherBug

5. The last step is to run an Anti-Malware Scan. To do that, Download Malware Bytes and run a scan.