Stop Annoying Ads
There is a simple way to avoid getting the
majority of ads that load with websites that you visit. Ads
from pages you visit are usually generated from an Ad server.
What happens is that when the site you visit loads, it calls the ads
from the adserver. If you looked at our My Security page, then
you already know that websites have a name address, domain name
(i.e. www.yahoo.com) and IP
addresses (i.e. http://64.58.76.225).
Expanding this network understanding, your
computer has a file in it called the hosts file. This file is
a mini-phonebook for the network that your computer is on.
Before going out to the Internet, your computer checks the host file
first to see if the domain name you are trying to access is listed
with its IP address. The reason for this is that computers
don't understand the domain names, but they do understand the IP
addresses. Every time you type in www.yahoo.com,
your computer searches what's called a domain server (big phonebook)
to find the IP address for www.yahoo.com.
However, before doing this it checks its own hosts file.
What we are going to do with the hosts file is
list all the ad servers and put in bogus IP Addresses that redirect
them to nowhere.
Your hosts file should be located at:
- Win 9x: c:\windows\
- Win NT/2000/XP: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\
c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\
but do a search on "hosts" just to make
sure. The file doesn't have any extension or program
associated with it. Once you have found the file copy and
paste these lines after the last line in the file.
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