Stop all those pop-up ads
You go to your favorite website to check the latest breaking news and find something that catches your interest on the list of news items. You click on it, but before you can get the chance to read the report, another window suddenly appears on your screen and blocks your view. The intruder usually contains some promotional material, such as an advertisement for a small, wireless video camera. XCam is the most widely known popup advertisement so far.
Now suppose you want to check the balance of your Tahapan BCA savings account. You type in www.klikbca.com in the address box and hit enter. As the homepage of this Internet banking site slowly loads onto your browser's window, a smaller window will also pop up. Only this time it will contain some useful message from the bank. These days, the popup messages just remind you to get your own KeyBCA security code generator, which is required for conducting transactions online.
Or perhaps you visit a website and then close it. As the browser window disappears from the screen, another website opens up in another window and you have no idea why it is suddenly there. This is also called an exit window as it appears after you exit the previous window. Soon you find yourself fighting a brush fire. What a waste of productive time!
Clearly, popup advertisements on the World Wide Web are getting more and more widespread. More commonly used by marketers, the ads can be very annoying. They slow down Internet download, too. If we use a dial-up or an ADSL service to access the Internet, we may end up paying for the information that we do not need or want. At any rate these popups make us feel violated. Worse, since we could eventually end up with multiple windows opened at the same time, our system may hang if it does not have enough memory.
In a way, popup ads are like computer viruses. You have computer viruses, and then you have people who develop the antidotes for the viruses. Today you have people who develop popup busters, popup killers, popup destroyers, popup stoppers, popup blockers and other programs that do more or less the same thing, namely, to help you prevent popups from cluttering your limited computer real estate. The great news is that most of these programs can be downloaded from the Internet for free.
One important feature that you should be looking for is the ability to choose which popups you want to block and which ones you do not want to block. Keep in mind that not all popups are useless and annoying.
Here are some of the popup blockers and eliminators that you can download from the Internet. PopupBuster can be downloaded from www.cableaid.com/PopUpBuster/. It requires no installation, and it still gives you the flexibility to open a popup should you decide to do so just by pressing the shift or control key.
No Ads is a small utility that will automatically close the popup windows that you choose. I came across a link to this utility in voiceforthem.topcities.com/. Ideally, of course, we want the utility to kill every popup even before it gets downloaded to our computer so that it will not waste our bandwidth. Another utility is Exit Killer 3.0 from www.exitkiller.com. It lets you choose between four sensitivity levels, so you can still allow some popups to crop up on your screen.
Then there is Popup Ad Filter. This one is not free. It is available from Meaya (www.meaya.com). It blocks popups without waiting for them to download. This US$24.95 utility also has a hotkey to disable the blockade temporarily. There is also Popup Free, but despite its name, it is not free. It costs $19.95 if you want to use it (www.itcompany.com/).
If you are curious about the magnitude of the fight against popups, here are the names of utilities that are listed by Yahoo: Ad Buster, Ad Muncher, Adextinguisher, AdKiller, AdsGone, NoPop Popup Killer, PanicWare and Super Popup Killer.
You may want to try out some of these utilities. Most of the commercial ones have free trial versions that can be test-driven for a certain length of time. The best way to do that is to always create a restore point on your system using the Windows System Restore utility before you install them. That way you can roll back to the previous system setting if you do not like the popup buster you have installed. -- Zatni Arbi