Free popup killer

Someone asked me today if I knew any programs that did a good job of killing popups.
I made three recommendations:

1. Switch to Firefox, or better still, Opera
2. Make sure popup blocking is enabled at the browser level
   
3. Install Ad Block Plus (a Firefox add-on)*

As for a program that will kill popups for you - this simply isn't necessary. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, then get Spysweeper - it is a great anti-malware program that monitors your system for changes and blocks popups, amongst other things. Whether you have the moula or not, however, there is a no-cost solution for Windows users:

Edit the hosts file
Win XP: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Win 2k: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Now edit the file to map the domains of the nasty popups you want to block, like this:


Note the lines are composed of two columns. The left column is the IP address you want to map the hostname to, while the right column is where you enter the hostname/domain name.

The hosts file is basically a text file that maps hostnames to an IP address - it will be the first place your computer will look when a hostname needs to be resolved, so it overrides anything obtained from the DNS server.

So, when a popup from www.partypoker.com is triggered, it maps to 127.0.0.1, which is your computer's loopback or localhost address, but since the page does not in fact reside there, it cannot load, and you will at most see a page not found instead of a nasty, annoying and potentially malicious popup.

The downside with this approach is that it is manual, and you have to get the popup at least once to add it to the list of "blocked" domains. The upside, of course, is that it is free.

* if you insist on persevering with Internet Explorer, then get "IE-Spyad", a registry file that will add a massive blacklist to your restricted sites list in IE.