How do i edit hosts file on windows 7

Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. By Mary Landesman Mary Landesman. Mary Landesman is a former freelance contributor to Lifewire and a security expert.

She was named as one of the women to watch in IT security. Reviewed by Ryan Perian. Tweet Share Email. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. You may feel difficult to use the keyboard when switching[ How to Edit Hosts File in Windows 7, 8 and 10?

Click on Start Button. Open Notepad Using Search in Windows 8. Opening a File in Notepad. Open Hosts File in Notepad in Windows 8. About Editorial Staff Editorial Staff at WebNots are team members who love to build websites and share the learning with webmasters community. Jun 7, Dec 22, Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier.

Click here and get The Ask Leo! Hope you can help me. In this excerpt from Answercast 89 , I look at changes in Windows 7 that protect the hosts file from being edited unless you specifically run Notepad as administrator. The issue here is that Windows 7 includes a certain amount of additional security.

You want Ask Leo! So with that in place, sometimes there are reasons that you want to change the Hosts file: for example, to prevent people from going to certain places. The number that this person mentioned at the beginning of the question, In other words, The hosts file has actually not moved in a long, long time. Now as I said earlier, Windows 7 increased the security on that file making it more difficult for random programs to modify it — because, as I said, malware can actually cause the lookup to be redirected, not necessarily to your machine… but to their machine.

You may think, for example, that you are going to Paypal. Many anti- spyware tools Spybot comes to mind actually perform a similar kind of lockdown of this file and prevent you from modifying it. You should be able to make entries in that file to make these kinds of mappings and then save the file. Since the hosts file is a known place where malware likes to play, sometimes your anti-malware software will also get in the way.

Next from Answercast Is it safe to let Quicken remember my online banking information?