Don't you just love those wonderful little popup ads that you get when visiting a site like GeoCities or Xoom? Well I don't, and so I wrote this program. It's pretty simple to use, simply double-click on the 'POW' icon, and you'll see it running on the task bar (by the clock on the Start menu). Now POW watches and waits for one of those nasty windows to open up and then POW! It slaps it down just like Adam West did when he was Batman!

To add a window to kill to the list, simply click on the POW! icon, which will bring up a menu, and select 'Add/Delete Popup'. This will bring up a listing of all the windows that are open, that POW! can detect. Just find the window you want to automagically be killed from the list at the bottom, and it will appear on the top list. Just select 'OK', and you should see the window go bye-bye in a second! It's that easy. To remove a window from the top list, just double click on it; if you make a mistake, just hit 'Cancel' and nothing will change.

Inside the 'Add/Delete Popup' dialog, there also is button called 'Import', this allows you to import window lists from other users, to do this, simple select the .DAT file that you received, and it will add any windows you don't already have to your list! If you want to make your window lists available to others, just copy your pow.dat file, rename it to 'JoeList.dat' or whatever, and put it up on your site! Is that easy or what!

You'll also find another option in 'Add/Delete Popup', and that is a button that will either say 'Tolerance On' or 'Tolerance Off'... In most cases you will not need this option turned on, but if for some reason it is not actively detecting your browser, turning this on will almost always fix the situation. Tolerance works a little different with Netscape than it does with IE. If you are using Netscape, and are having it close 'Unspecified Netscape' windows, then you need to make sure to launch POW! AFTER you've started up Netscape and it's connected to a website, otherwise it will close the Netscape window, which is probably not what you want. IE doesn't have this problem.

The 'Edit' option is used to expand the string matching capabilities of POW; for example, say a popup does something like, oh, put a date at the end. Normally this would foul things up, but now you can tell it to make partial matches; so if it's title was "Lame Banner Ad 01/01/1999", you would add it like normal, but then select it and choose Edit; then, remove the date, and in it's place put a single '*' asterisk; so it now becomes "Lame Banner Ad *", and it will automatically close anything that begins with that text... You can also put the asterisk at the beginning or the middle of the title; but you can only have ONE asterisk per entry, so don't put any extra.

There is one final option called 'Custom Type', which is to help detect windows which have been modified in such a way that POW doesn't detect them normally, or even when Tolerance has been turned on. You shouldn't use this option unless both of the previous methods fail, so make sure to try them before doing this. Now, you need to find out what is unique to the windows that are not showing up; normally this will be something along the lines of a " - Company" at the end of the window title... Now, just click on 'Custom Type', enter in " - Company", click Ok, and if you've given the program enough information, then they should show up on the list. Please keep in mind that you want this to be as specific as possible, otherwise POW might mis-identify windows and inadvertently close the wrong one.

It's been tested with both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and works fine. It might work with AOL, I don't know, and it probably doesn't work with Opera... If your browser is running, and it can't identify any windows in the Add/Delete dialog, then it doesn't support your browser.