Do you need to edit your hosts file on Vista? Vista hass much tighter security that Windows XP did and by default, if you try to modify your hosts file in Vista, it will not let you save the changes. Vista will tell you that you don't have the necessary permissions.

To successfully modify the hosts file, the simplest way is to run notepad.exe as an administrator and open the file, make the changes, then save it back out.

Steps

1. Go to your start menu and browse to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories
2. In the accessories list of programs, right click "Notepad" and then select the "Run as administrator" menu option
3. Click on the "Continue" button on the UAC prompt that will pop up
4. In notepad, click on File -> Open
5. You now need to find the hosts file, so browse to "C:WindowsSystem32Driversetc"
6. The default filtering is for text files only, to see the hosts file you will need to change the file filter drop down box from "Text Documents (*.txt)" to "All Files (*.*)"
7. You will now see the hosts file in the etc folder, select "hosts" and click "Open"
8. At this point you can make the necessary changes to the  hosts file, save them out and close the Notepad.

• Changes to the hosts file can disrupt your networking so dont attempt to modify it unless you know what you are doing!
• If you are adding a ip address and domain name to the lists, you should add it under the localhost entries so as not to disrupt internal systems

• Make a backup of yor hosts file before you edit it so if you have any problems you can always revert back to the old file!