How to Edit Your Windows HOSTS File

This article explains how to edit your Windows HOST file.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A Windows Computer

1. Double click My Computer and double click the Local Disk your C: Drive

2. Browse to the WINDOWS folder and/or WINNT folder which ever one applies and where your Windows install directory is located typically it is C:\Windows

3. Browse and double click on the "System32" folder

4. Browse and double click on the "drivers" folder

5. Browse and double click on the "etc" folder

6. Inside the "etc" folder you will see several files such as; hosts, lmhosts.sam, networks, protocol, services
   The file which we are going to edit is the "HOSTS" file

7. 
    
   Open With Dialog Box

   Right Click on the HOSTS file and select Open or Open With. An Open With dialog box will appear. You will now need to select a program to open the HOSTS file, please select Notepad

8. Once the file is open you will notice it is a standard text file. On the bottom of the file you will see the following.
   # For example:
   #
   # 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
   # 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
   
   127.0.0.1 localhost

9. Anything with a # before the line is excluded from the file so the only entry that matters in this case is
   127.0.0.1 localhost

10. To add a manual entry see my example below (this is an example)
    127.0.0.1 localhost
    74.125.19.103 www.google.com
    192.168.0.150 MyHouseServer

11. On Notepad go to File and Select Save and now your HOSTS file is now edited and these settings are applied, you can now close Notepad.

Tips & Warnings

• The reason you add host entry's is to force your local Windows computer to use a certain IP address or DNS name to match a certain IP or DNS name. Basically if you want someone to access a local server by the name of the server or IP you can create a static entry on the local computer.
• The Windows HOST file overrides your DNS settings on the local computer.