Nox, despite being the most feature-filled Android emulator, has a lot of negativity surrounding it due to their antics when it comes to making income off of their program. It is known for running repeated advertisments in the background, calling home and passing along system information (outside of your Android instance) as well as a vast amount of potentially sensitive data in an encrypted payload back to their multitude of servers. With the following preventitive measures, we can prevent a majority of this happening as well as greatly improve the overall performance.

1. Download and Install a fresh copy of Nox. The latest version is fine (for now). If you already have it installed, that is fine too. No need to reinstall.

2. Enable Root Mode on Nox by clicking the gear icon and then checking the Root Startup box.

3. Install a new Launcher from the Play Store. ANYTHING but Nox's default. I suggest Nova Launcher.

4. Once your launcher of choice is installed, click the Home icon and choose Nova Launcher and to Always Use This Launcher.

5. Go to your App Drawer and open File Manager and navigation to System -> app. In this folder, find Launcher_X.X.X_en_signed.apk and FacebookLite.apk – delete them. If it says they are not found after tapping delete, just tap delete again.

6. Close Nox and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and right click the hosts file and open it in Notepad (Run as Administrator if needed) or a plain text editor of your choice (e.g. Notepad++, VS Code, etc.) – once open, append the following list to the bottom of the file:

127.0.0.1 api.bignox.com
127.0.0.1 tracking.trnox.com
127.0.0.1 bi.yeshen.com
127.0.0.1 launcher.us.yeshen.com
127.0.0.1 pubstatus.sinaapp.com
127.0.0.1 noxagile.duapp.com
127.0.0.1 common.duapps.com
127.0.0.1 pasta.esfile.duapps.com
127.0.0.1 api.mobula.sdk.duapps.com
127.0.0.1 hmma.baidu.com
127.0.0.1 nrc.tapas.net
127.0.0.1 au.umeng.com
127.0.0.1 www.yeshen.com
127.0.0.1 www.yeshen.com.w.kunlungr.com
127.0.0.1 hm.e.shifen.com
127.0.0.1 tdcv3.talkingdata.net
127.0.0.1 alog.umeng.com
127.0.0.1 sdk.open.inc2.igexin.com
127.0.0.1 androiden.duapp.com

7. Once you have appended the above and successfully saved, close Notepad and navigate to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Nox and open Conf.ini in the same editor used for hosts above. Once open, change the following options to the values defined below:

pop_ads_refresh_time=9223372036854775807
service_qq=0
service_qq_link=<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"#\" style=\"text-decoration: underline; color:#00d0f0;\"></a>
collect_behavior_enable=9223372036854775807
collect_behavior_interveral=9223372036854775807
root=false

Afterwards, save and close the file. Right Click it, go to Properties, and check Read Only so Nox will not revert these changes.

Once this is all done, you are free to re-open Nox and continue playing as usual.