| Product: |
AnalogX POW! |
| Date: |
08.07.06 (91 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Lets you open as many windows as you want, won't slaughter ones from links, FREE program
Disadvantages: You have to teach this thing what to slay
Pop-ups. We all hate them, don't we? But how to get rid of them. There are several ways, and one is by using a pop-up blocking program. The one I'm using today is called POW by AnalogX! I first discovered this program when my PopKi program started crashing my computer and I needed a program to get rid of those nasty pop-ups. After having read several opinions of different pop-up assassins, I decided to try “POW!”
Why POW? Well, first of all, from what I’d heard, it was a small program and an easy download. I went to the site (see below), clicked the spot, downloaded the installation program, ran that and voila! It was all on my computer, and made practically no dent at all on my (then limited) disk space all within only about 10 minutes from start to finish. So yes, it’s small and easy to download. That was plus #1.
Secondly, I’d heard that this was easy to use. Well, all you have to do is find the right executable file (that’s what the “exe” ending means, you know) and double-click on it. It will then appear in that little utility window on your taskbar, showing you that it’s running. If you want, you can put a copy of this file into your start-up menu so that you don’t even have to double-click on it to get it going.
Of course, if this had been the end of it and it just threw off those nasty pop-ups for me, then I might have been very pleased. But the problem I found with POW is that you actually have to “teach” the program what windows you want and which ones are OK. There are plusses and minuses to this, which I will now explain.
Plusses: whereas with PopKi it will smash down everything, including if you just want to open a new browser window or accidentally click on a link that opens a new window, POW will allow all of these things totally unhindered. Meaning, you don’t have to tell PopKi “now I want to open a new window” or turn it off altogether when you know you want multiple windows open or just think you might be hitting a link that opens a wanted pop-up. Since I often forget that a certain link will open a new window, I found PopKi a bit annoying in having to “baby-sit” it all the time. With POW you don’t have that problem.
Another good thing is that you can edit the URLs of the things you want the program to shoot down. For instance, say you see you’ve added a bunch of URLs to POW that all start with the string “http://ads”. If you go into the add/delete menu of this program, you can edit one of those URLs and add the wildcard symbol “*” after that string so that anytime any pop-up appears that has that string of characters, the program will trounce it.
Minuses: each and every pop-up on the net will appear at least once, until you tell the program that you don’t want it to stay open. If you forget to add the pop-up onto your POW, that same one will re-appear again, until you put it in. While you can use those wildcard symbols (“*” and “?” placed properly into a URL), this is an extra step (or more usually several steps) that will take up your time and still have you getting those nasty pop-ups opening all over the place. In short, you do have to “baby-sit” POW – at least in the beginning – in order to keep the pop-ups away. And of course, the Internet is so very clever that someone will find a way to make these pop-ups immune to this suppression program.
But it really isn’t that difficult to teach POW what pop-ups you want it to kick off. Once the program is running, when a pop-up opens, all you have to do is click (right or left, doesn’t matter which) on the little yellow round fuzzy face thingy in that’s in that taskbar utility window. You’ll immediately get a menu with four options. These options are:
About - all this tells you is who makes this program, the version number you’re using and where you can find it with a button you can click on to get to their web page.
Pause/Unpause - (sic) despite the spelling problem here, this is simply a way for you to tell the program to go on hold. When the program is paused, you’ll see a red X through that yellow icon. When it’s un-paused, the X isn’t there – it’s as simple as that.
Add/Delete Pop-up - this is the meat and potatoes of this program. When you choose this option you’ll get a pop-up (A-HA! No, wait – this is a good pop-up) that has two windows. The upper window is the list of pop-up URLs and phrases that POW will exterminate for you. The bottom window is a list of the browser windows that are presently open. If one of the browser windows in the bottom frame is an unwanted pop-up, all you have to do is double-click on that item, then click on the “done” button below, and the pop-up will be exterminated immediately and never be allowed to darken your door again. If you accidentally add a URL or phrase into the upper frame, you can remove it by double-clicking on it, and POW will allow that to open freely again.
Along with these two frames, you’ll find several buttons along the bottom of the box. These are:
§ Tolerance Off/Tolerance On (toggle) - this is supposed to help the program detect your browser properly. I’m not completely sure what this means, but the default shows “Tolerance Off” for me, and this program works fine with IE, but not with Opera or Avant.
§ Custom Type: if toggling the tolerance button doesn’t work, you can use this option to help the program identify pop-up windows that aren’t being properly murdered. I haven’t had the need to use this yet, so I guess all is well for me on this front.
§ Edit - with this you can modify a URL or phrase or string from those in the list in the top frame so that all of a certain type of pop-up will always be throttled by this program. Here’s where those cute wildcard symbols come in. Often similar looking pop-ups from certain sites will come in with totally unique URLs to each and every one of them. So, for instance I could add http://www.dispised-adsite.com/* and http://www.youhatemedon’tyou/* into this so that any pop-ups by these names will be desiccated on sight.
§ Import: this is a way you can import lists of URLs, etc. into this program. If you have been using another pop-up eradicator that keeps a *.dat file of the pop-up addresses you despise, this will let you pull that information into this program.
§ Done: surprise, surprise, you click on this when you’re done with this frame.
The last option when you click on that yellow icon is:
Exit - I hope you won’t be totally shocked to learn that this is a way for you to unload the program altogether. You wouldn’t? Oh, good, because that’s exactly what this does. Simple, right? Yes, it is.
Now, at one point we stopped using this program when we changed from the IE to the Opera browser. POW does not work with Opera, and I understand that it also doesn’t work with Avant and some of the other non-IE browsers out there. At work, I don’t use POW since my office prefers us to use the Google bar option instead (which is fine, but you’ll have to remember to turn it back on after you’ve turned it off to get a certain wanted pop-up page). But since we upgraded our computer at home and are back to using IE, we’ve been inundated with pop-ups and I’m running POW again.
Finally, my verdict on this program - “guilty, as charged, m’lud!” Um… I mean, yes, this program works, and does work well. I’m happy to say that it still is a totally free program. It takes a bit of fiddling and fussing to get it to purge all the pop-up windows you hate so very much. But I’m beginning to prefer it to PopKi since I would rather have a program that can learn what pop-up windows I want to slaughter rather than a program that just does a blind, indiscriminate pop-up holocaust. So although I’m only giving this one four stars, it might be a good option for you all to take a look at.
(And I did enjoy finding as many synonyms for “kill” as I could possibly find for this review. Did you find them all? If so, thanks for reading!)
Thanks for reading!
Davida Chazan © November 2002, updated July 2006
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Technical Stuff (not much this time):
POW is a totally free download program from the AnalogX web page (http://www.analogx.com/CONTENTS/download/network/ pow.htm) and the version I have on my computer is 1.58, which I see is still the latest version available.
The program comes with a *.txt file with all of the details of this program which will explain anything you didn’t understand from this review. It also has an uninstall program in case you decide this program is crap. To each his own, I say!
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Summary: Excellent, free, downloadable program that works very well with deleting pop-ups through IE
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