Adblock equivalent for Windows?

[lyphe]

A few sites I use regularly have just gone nuts on ads lately, with a bunch of the video ones autoplaying and ruining the experience. I've been resisting, but I think the day to add an addblocker has arrived.

My question is this. I know that Adblock for Chrome and Adblock Plus for Firefox are very highly regarded. Is there something equivalent for Windows (7)?

Ty in advance.

 

[Eduello]

You know that you can run Chrome on Win 7, right?

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Well, do you mean adblock for Windows 7? Or adblock for Internet Explorer? If you're getting popup ads while you're using windows programs, you have a pretty serious problem. If you mean for IE, I'm not sure, but doing the 'hosts' hack eliminates a lot of crap across all browsers.

What the hosts file does is redirect well known advertising site IP addresses with a null routing of 127.0.0.1 - effectively routing to 'localhost' which of course is your computer, and thus it gets no data. It does this replacement in the hosts file (located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ directory) which overrides any and all dns entries (network dns queries are compared first against the hosts file, then if they're not there, they check the dns servers on the internet). This routes them to the equivalent of a black hole, and voila, no ads.

Google 'hosts based ad blocking' - one of the first pages should have it at mvps.org