| Product: |
Pop-Up Stopper |
| Date: |
03/11/02 (4538 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Effective
Disadvantages: No Uninstall Program
A couple of months back, I was becoming utterly frustrated with those annoying little advertising popup windows that appear whist surfing the internet. I am sure that many members here on dooyoo will have suffered these same frustrations because at the time, the main culprit was this site. In my experience, for every opinion I read or rated and each time I checked the comments on my own reviews, the popup window advertising “freeserve” would appear. Also many of you who write over at ciao will no doubt have the same problems because these popup windows are consistent over there.
I had heard of many variants of popup stopper programs that were available, so I decided to have a look at a few and see just how effective they actually are at killing these little blighters. After trying several of the most talked about, such as popup defender, popup smasher, popup eraser and popup stopper, I decided to leave popup stopper installed on my system. I will now give you an outline of the deciding factors.
First of all, let me tell you that there are currently 3 versions available for download, the FREE version which this review will concentrate on, popup stopper companion and popup stopper pro. The latter two are available at $20 for the pro version or $40 for the companion version – both are also available to download for a 30 days evaluation. Using the FREE version to great effect, I have had no desire to purchase any of these two versions.
The FREE version is available for download from panicware’s website at www.panicware.com and is a very small installation program at only 442K, I am currently on broadband and it took me only 5 seconds to download, if you are using 56K dial-up access, then I would estimate that it will take around 90 seconds to download. No registration is required at all to download the file.
Installation is incredibly straight forward, once I double-clicked the downloaded file, I just c
licked the ‘Next’ button on several of the dialogues and then the ‘Finish’ button on the final dialogue and the software was installed with no need to restart the system. In the system tray on the lower right of the screen is the icon of the popup stopper, and is illustrated as a window with a cross through it.
The popup stopper is initially disabled and the icon has a grey cross through it, so to enable it you will need to right click on it’s icon in the system tray. The top option in the list is “Do Not Allow Pop-Up Browser Windows”, selecting this will enable the stopper and when selected, the icon in the lower right will have a red cross through it to indicate that it is enabled.
The next option on the list is “Preferences” and gives options as to whether you want the program to start when windows starts and if so, it will remember if you enabled/disabled the popup stopper last time you used your computer. There is also a toggle to switch “aggressive pop-up control” on or off – when this is on, absolutely no browser windows will be allowed to be opened including new browser windows, when this option is off, new browser windows can be opened and “known” popup windows will be stopped. I prefer having this setting on because the software allows you to open new browsers or links from other pages if you hold down either the shift or the control key when you click. There are also notification preferences that allows the icon to be flashed or a sound played or a combination of both when a popup window is stopped.
Also when right clicking on the icon in the system, there is an option to report popup windows that were not blocked, panicware are requesting as much information as possible about what page(s) trigger the popup windows. I have never had to report a one because I always run the program on “aggressive pop-up control” so therefore elim
inating any chance of popup windows appearing. Panicware take all information given to them by the users and update the software available for download when significant improvements have been made i.e. they are able to stop a number of new pop-up windows in “non aggressive” mode.
The software will run on most PC systems. Currently the software is supported on Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT, 2000 and XP and with browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.1 and above or Netscape 4.0 and above. This software does not work with the AOL browser.
There is one little niggle that I have with the software and that is the fact that the software does not have an uninstall program associated with it (I am just so hard to please!), so if at any point you do wish to uninstall the program, you have to do this through the control panel, however I cannot see myself wanting to remove this software any time soon.
All in all, it is a very simple program with no complicated options or settings and it fulfils it’s purpose with great effect and best of all it is FREE. What more can you ask for from a popup stopper? This is worthy of a 5 star rating from me.
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