![]() These have hundreds of bothersome and downright nasty site addresses blocked in them, and are written in exactly the same format as the win7 file uses. Hovering your mouse over junk ads can also give you additional info.Īlso: If you can still find them, there are very good (reputable) ‘host’ files on the internet for legacy versions of windows (’95, ’98, etc.) that you can copy or cut-and-paste into the win7 hosts file. Keeping an eye on your status bar can be a very basic but often useful aid to alert you to some of this activity. I find it to be one of the MOST useful files for blocking garbage URLs being accessed by otherwise useful sites for commercial or information gathering purposes. I suggest putting a shortcut on the desktop for quick updates to the ‘hosts’ file. Sysnative is an alias that can only be used from 32-bit processes to access the 64-bit System32 directory. This works because file system redirection is disabled for the “etc” directory and thus accessing the 64-bit System32 works from a 32-bit process. Navigating to “etc” from the root does not work (because System32 is redirected and Sysnative is not shown in directory listings). Please note that in both cases the full path must be used. If you want to access hosts from a 32-bit process, use one of the following paths. Select “All Files” in the bottom right corner. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. Click on the Start button, type “notepad” and press CTRL SHIFT ENTER.Here is how to do it with 64-bit Notepad: If you want to edit the hosts file, you first need to locate and open it – on Vista and newer with UAC enabled from an elevated process (with admin rights). The latter is shown to 32-bit processes under the name system32. Actually there are two independent folders in any 圆4 installation: system32 and SysWOW64. The requirement of two different system32 directories was solved by redirection. For compatibility reasons, the name of the system32 folder did not change in Windows 圆4, although on 64-bit platforms the folder does not contain 32-bit but 64-bit executables! That leaves the question of where to put the 32-bit files that 32-bit processes need – and also expect to find in system32? Obviously, the same DLL cannot be present twice in the same folder. Many people, including the person writing MS KB article 972034, see the number “64” in the name of the folder SysWOW64 and think: yes, that must be the 64-bit version of system32. But where is that directory located on disk? Is it the one natively called system32, or is it SysWOW64? Redirection Confusion ![]() And it is right where it belongs, in the 64-bit system32 directory. The answer is: no, the hosts file exists only once on 圆4 Windows. Now, where would the hosts file be located – or are there even two (potentially different) files? But wait: 64-bit systems have two system32 directories: one for 64-bit processes and the other for 32-bit processes. As you probably know, the hosts file was, is and probably will always be located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc. Is Hosts 64-bit or 32-bit?Īs always, I am more interested in what the package does, and Microsoft is kind enough to explain that in most “Fix it for me” articles. But anyhow, there seem to be enough people asking MS support for this or they would not have troubled with creating a package (ResetHOSTSFileBackToDefaults.MSI) that basically empties the hosts file. An entry for localhost (IPv4 and IPv6) is all you need, and on Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 not even that. The topic alone is funny enough – it is not as if the default hosts file contained great amounts of data. I just stumbled upon a KB article that describes how to reset the hosts file to its original state. The subtle differences between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows present so many intricacies and pitfalls that even Microsoft employees seem to have trouble getting it right.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |