Hotmail can be considered to be the first public e-mail services provider and has served the people amazingly since then. It has many times upgraded the interface to give a better working environment to its users and make it more and more user friendly. Till date Hotmail has been the most widely used and most trusted e-mail service. Recently they did a collaboration with Microsoft Live and now one single Hotmail user ID and password can be used to login to all the services of Microsoft Live and much more. It has become a real need for the users who use various services of Microsoft Live. Since the user base of Hotmail has increased many times and so is the interest of companies to use its web pages as advertising space. Sometimes it become annoying to see so many ads on the Hotmail web pages, and they often result in slow working of the pages on slow connections. In this post I will give you some steps to stop such ads to be displayed and load the web page faster.
Before we go into the steps let us understand how advertisements work. Advertisements are small piece of code written on the website so that it can fetch the advertisement from its server when the actual page loads. So we can conclude that advertisements are from some other server and not on the actual websites server.
Thus if we know the address of these advertisement servers then we can surely block the same and not let ads to slow down the loading of any website. Now please go through the steps given below:
Step 1: Click on ‘Start’ button and then on ‘Run’. If ‘Run’ is not a listed option then please press the Windows key along with ‘R’ on the keyboard.
Step 2: When you get the ‘Run’ box please type ‘C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\’ without quotes and press ‘Enter’. This is the path to open the Etc folder and alternatively you can even browse to the same one folder at a time using Windows Explorer.
Step 3: In Etc folder you will see several files and one of them would be ‘Hosts’. This file has no extension to it and so there would be no icon associated with it. We need to open this file in Notepad, so right click on this file and select ‘Open With’. Further select Notepad to open the ‘Hosts’ file in Notepad.
Step 4: Go to the end of the file and add the following lines:
127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1 live.rads.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ads1.msn.com
127.0.0.1 static.2mdn.net
127.0.0.1 g.msn.com
127.0.0.1 a.ads2.msads.net
127.0.0.1 b.ads2.msads.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ac3.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ec.atdmt.com
Step 5: Save the file and close the other windows.
Step 6: Now open Hotmail.com and now you will see that there will be no ads on it.
For understanding the concept let me state that Hosts file is the file which acts as the first DNS for any browser and if any sites name is present in this file then the IP address given along with it is taken as its IP address. So in this workaround we gave our own Local Address for these locations which will never yield any advertisements. You can do the same to block any website on your computer.
