Hosts News

Windows Vista Performance Information Utility

Once you get Vista installed or you purchase a new Vista machine, open the new Performance Information and Tools in the Control Panel. You should see your "Windows® Experience Index" ... I would suggest taking a screenshot and saving it. Then as you add/change drivers or hardware you can re-calculate the WEI, however once you do this the previous score is gone.

The reason I mention saving the screenshot is once I updated my graphics (ATI) card drivers, the "Graphics Subscore" dropped from 2.9 and 5.1 to 1.0 ... ouch! Needless to say I removed them and went back to the (Vista) supplied drivers ...

You can also use this utility to see if Overclocking your system is really doing any good. Again take a screenshot before and after. I jacked up my AMD setting in the BIOS and a few other setting without getting too carried away and was able to gain quite a bit, and Vista is still very stable.

You can find a very good article here on the "Windows® Experience Index".

Updating the HOSTS file in Windows Vista using SendTo

Previously I had reported the problems updating the HOSTS file in Windows Vista ... well I've come up with a workable solution using SendTo. You can see the step-by-step instructions here.

Note: I've tested several of the 3rd party HOSTS utilities for updating the HOSTS file and these do not work ... hopefully the authors are working on new versions.

Updating the HOSTS file in Windows Vista

Unfortunately with UAC (User Account Control) enabled the "mvps.bat" is not permitted to update the HOSTS file. This is due to the restrictions imposed by UAC in that no "batch" files are allowed to access/change a System file. For now the only work-around is to turn off UAC (requires reboot) then run the "mvps.bat", then enable UAC again.

Alternately you can do it manually (without turning off UAC) ... that is after extracting the "hosts.zip" to a "temp" folder rename the existing HOSTS file (hosts.mvp) then copy the included HOSTS file to the "Windows\System32\drivers\etc" folder. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with a better solution soon ...

HOSTS file update 02-16-07

The MVPS HOSTS file was recently updated [02-16-07]
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Download: hosts.zip (134 kb)
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip

How To: Download and Extract the HOSTS file
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts2.htm

HOSTS File - Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hostsfaq.htm

Note: the "text" version makes a great resource
for determining possible culprits ... (556 kb)
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

Sign up for HOSTS file update notices
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm#contribute

Trojan.Codec turns nasty

Looks like these "codec" sites have ramped-up the threat level as they are now running a nasty javascript on these sites that NOD32 detects as "JS/TrojanDownloader.Agent.AB"

As usual these culprits are registered at Intercage/EstDomains ...

Another bogus Image ActiveX Object error

Landing on pixyoung(dot)com the viewer is presented with a blank page and a bogus error ...

Yeah you guessed it, no mater which button you click you're trapped into clicking Continue ... however you can always press Alt & F4 on the keyboard to get out. Clicking Continue leads you to another Trojan.Codec site (sitesentrance(dot)com) via 216.255.181.154

sitesentrance(dot)com already exists in the HOSTS file, so I would recommend adding 216.255.181.154 to your Internet Explorer Restricted Zone. pixyoung(dot)com and the related sites will be added to the next update.