I’m currently using one of those “free” ISPs that pop up banner ads every now and again. I know I should just break down and pay the $9.99 a month for something without ads, but that’d be $9.99 less for beer!
I’ve checked out reviews for some cleanerson CNet; ad-aware, webwasher, etc, and they all seem to have quite a high percentage of satisfied users. It’s the stories from the 5-10% of the people who had bad experiences that make me cringe. Stuff like “I lost my hard drive” or “I had to renistall everything” or “I lost my ability to see” makes me think twice.
I’m poor enough to not have a burner or any way to back-up my HD, should I worry? Does anyone have experience with a good ad buster?
I used Webwasher for awhile, and it worked as advertised. The only thing I didn’t care for was that each popup had to be manually added to a list in order to be suppressed in the future.
Now I use Pop-Up Stopper. It’s free, and suppresses all additional pop-ups in IE. They also have a product which works with Netscape, though I haven’t tried that. Any links which require a secondary browser window can be launched by holding down the CTRL key while selecting the link.
I’m in no way affiliated with any product mentioned in this post, other than being a satisfied user.
I use POW! by AnalogX [ http://www.analogx.com ]. It’s a simple pop-up killer only, but it also requires each pop-up to be manually added. It is freeware, though, which is great for a cheapskate like me (as with Purd, I’m not affiliate to them).
Here’s one word of caution for manual pop-up killers. They often seem to work by automatically closing any window with a particular title. The down side is that if you have a pop-up with a generic title (e.g. “Enter here”) it will also kill any perfectly valid web pages with that title. Be careful what you add to the “kill” list.