Beating The Pop-up Hands Down
Newcastle Herald
Monday November 24, 2003
Q: A few months ago, in The Herald, your column ``Pop-ups giving you the pip?" mentioned two ways to remove pop-up advertising. We downloaded Ad-Aware as you suggested and use it regularly to clean up any advertising. Now, however, we are being hit by an aggressive ad every five minutes while on the internet. We tried your second trick of editing the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file. The problem is that we can't right-click the ad and choose properties to find its address so we can modify the file. We are running Windows XP and right-clicking the ad gives no clues to a site address of any sort. We suspect that this ad may be part of the Kazaa media desktop program which we'd like to keep. Can we get rid of this annoying pop-up or do we have to recognise each other's right to co-exist on the internet?
A: You are quite likely correct Kazaa does come bundled with a large amount of advertising. It is certainly probably that Kazaa is the source of your pop-up ad.
There are two possible things you can do. The first and probably best is to replace Kazaa with Kazaa Lite a modified version which is still free but actually has no advertising. You can download it from http://www.kazaalite.tk/ and you should find it does everything you're used to with Kazaa. It is not any different functionality-wise.
The other thing to try is to download a pop-up ad-blocking program. You can get a wide range of information on many different products at http://www.popup-blocker.info/.
These programs run silently and monitor each window that opens on your computer. If the title matches a built-in list (for example ``Make money fast") it will close the window immediately so you never see it. If any pop-up ads do still open you can usually easily drag the window onto the pop-up blocking program to add that window title to the list to block.
Both will have the desired effect but, to my mind, it's best to not have the ads in the first place rather than just not see them because the ads are stealing bandwidth from your internet connection and are also accumulating as part of your download quota.
Finally, do be sure to always have Ad-Aware (download from http://www.lavasoft.nu/) check for updates before performing a scan in case a newer version exists.
David Williams is the national IT manager for Advantage Personnel. Send your questions to dwilliams@advantagepersonnel.com.au.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald