For the few, who need to bypass the standard DNS settings or who develop and manage websites and need to edit hosts file are quite stuck up with the UAC in Micro$oft’s Windows Vista.

Here are the few ways to edit the hosts file in Windows Vista, which I came across while googling for the solution.

For non-frequent edits :

1. Open Notepad with Administrative privileges by clicking Start, All Programs,Accessories, and then right-click Notepad and select to open as Administrator.
2. Now that Notepad is open with Administrative privileges browse to (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc) in Notepad and open the hosts file.
3. Now you can edit and save the hosts file.

For frequent editing

Here’s how to create a shortcut on your desktop and easily open your hosts file with Notepad and edit it.

1. Send a shortcut to Notepad to your desktop by right-clicking Notepad in the start menu and selecting send to desktop.
2. Right-click the shortcut to Notepad on your desktop and select properties.
3. Click the advanced button near the bottom of the shortcut tab and check off run as administrator. Click OK in the advanced properties window.
4. Replace “ %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe “ with ” %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts “ in the target box. Click OK in the properties window to save the changes.
5. Now all you have to do is open that shortcut to open your hosts file with Notepad with administrative privileges.

Related articles

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• Top 10 Ways To Tweak and Improve Windows Vista Considerably (taragana.com)
• Disable The Run Command In Vista (lockergnome.com)
• The Top Windows 7 Tips and Tricks List (chris.pirillo.com)

Sometimes device driver maintenance can be a pain in the wrong place, esp in Windows. XP is good with USB devices with automatic detection and configuration, but it’s not so good with removing them. The device drivers are not removed automatically and they create a havoc in your system on a longer run. My office laptop came with pre-installed XP and it’s been running for past 3 years and it has seen it fair share of new hardware. For a automation engineer it’s a nightmare to add devices knowing that somewhere something is going to wrong because of your unused drivers. Also every time your OS boots up, it loads your unused drivers too until you physically uninstall them. Below is a procedure to remove your unused device drivers from Windows XP.

1. Go to System properties dialog box from your control panel or press [Win] + [Break]
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button which is quite below.
3. Click “New” button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the dialog box, type “devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices” in the Varibale Name field and “1 ” in the Variable Value field.
5. Click OK to exit.
6. Right Click “My Computer” in the desktop and click “Manage” to take you to Computer Management.
7. Select Device Manager in the left menu, and then go to View menu in the top and select “Show Hidden Devices”
8. In the devices tree shown below, expand the various branches in the device tree and look for unused devices or hidden devices which will be indicated by grayed-out or washed out icons.
9. Right-Click the devices and select Uninstall to remove the device driver.
10. Continue this procedure for the entire list of unused drivers.

Source : [Tech-Republic]

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