Popups!

We all hate them, don’t we?

I decided to have a quick look round for something quick and easy to help get rid of popups.

If you read all the issues, you’ll see that I have become a fan of the AnalogX site.

http://www.analogx.com/welcome.htm

This site is packed with small utilities that make your life easier, so it was one of the first sites I had a look at.

Yes, they do have a stopper!

A really big download, this one, all 214k of it.

This is for version 1.58.

The stopper is called POW. Cheesy or what?

It comes down as an exe file, so always remember to virus check files that come this way, you never know when some git might manage to tamper with the downloads section of a site.

Anyway, double clicking on the exe once its down will install the stopper. Another painless installation.

Once you start POW, it remains on your task bar. It comes preconfigured for a few popups. Looks something like this…… if you right click on the taskbar icon for POW and select add/delete popup.

Right, how do we add popups so that we never see them again?

Click “done” and POW disappears back onto the task bar. Start Internet Explorer and surf to a site you know has popups.

Bring up POW again, see how the display has changed?

We now have all windows that are open listed. Available eBay stores is a popup.

Double click on the offending popup to add it to the top list and click “done.”

That’s it, the popup should now disappear, and every time a window called by that name opens, its automatically shut.

Dead simple and effective!!

Ok, a quick look at the other buttons.

The “tolerance” button: this helps if POW doesn’t actively detect the windows opened, the author states that it helps with Netscape. Since I don’t use Netscape, I’ll believe him.

Edit is for windows where the popup adds something like a date at the end of the popup. This could prevent POW from detecting the window after that date, so simply click edit and delete the offending part of the title and add an asterisk……..

Custom type is another method of detecting windows with weird titles, if the tolerance or edit buttons don’t help; this remains the only other option of detecting them correctly.

Of the three browsers I use (I.E., Opera and Mozilla), only I.E. is detected, but the author already stated that it won’t work with Opera.

So, if you use I.E., give this a try and get rid of popups simply and effectively.

By Ian Urie

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