Reduce Banner Ads While Surfing
They are everywhere these days. Those annoying little
ads that show up at the top of many web pages, or even worse pop up in
their own window. These aren't really desirable, they waste your
bandwidth and just do not belong.
There is a lot that can be done to stop these, mainly
add on programs that proclaim to stop all pop-ups and advertising. Some
of these are good, some are downright bad for your computer.
But there is a much simpler solution, telling your
computer that a whole heap of known advertisement servers, just do not
exist. With this simple system, many web pages will appear with the ads
as shown above, just missing images.
To do this, you need to edit your windows
hosts. file.
Windows 95/98/Me |
|
c:\windows\ |
|
|
|
Windows NT/2000/2003/XP |
|
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\
OR
c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\
(administrator access is required) |
The hosts. file doesn't
have an extension. Open notepad and
navigate to the above location and open the
hosts. file.
If a hosts. file doesn't
exist, open the hosts.sam file in the
same location and save it as hosts. (with the ending . )
If you are having trouble finding or editing your
hosts file, your can download a ready to go one
here (right click and select save as...),
save in the appropriate directory as shown in the table above.
Note: By default, downloading this
file will save it with a .txt extension, you do not want
this. In the Save As dialog box, select Save as Type: All
Files, then save as hosts. with the ending period. I've
slightly modified this file to use 127.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1,
this works better if you run a web server on your computer.
The hosts. file tells your computer where to
lookup and find web sites. What you have just done is tell your
computer that the ad sites listed are found at: 127.0.0.1 which is
your own computer's internal IP address, so the ads cannot be
downloaded and displayed.
To verify that your have edited your
hosts. file
correctly, try browsing to:
http://ad.adsmart.net if it does
not connect, you have succeeded!
If something goes wrong while
following these instructions, you may find your computer system will not
longer boot, or otherwise function incorrectly. This can create a very
time consuming repair process. Even though I try to make these
instructions foolproof and reversible, computers are computers and
strange things can happen.
Use at your own
risk!! |
Need help, just email me
below.
|