Originally Posted By: John Sims
Originally Posted By: Fishmonger



I filter out about 1500 domain names on my system that are known junk that slow you down and do nothing but tell the big internet companies what you are up to or litter your screen with ads. Ditching these sites from your web experience makes things faster. Worth doing if you are not afraid to edit the "hosts" file on your PC: how to make the internet suck less.



Hi Fishmonger,
Great link (I think). I copied and pasted the page into notepad, saved as a .txt file, deleted the .txt, changed the name of the current hosts file to hosts_old (in case I needed it again), moved the new hosts file into the folder, and "think" my internet experience is improved. Hard to tell, but I am looking forward to an absence of advertisements based on my browsing/searches.
One question: Do I need to merge the two hosts files (Old and New)? The only entry (other than comments) in the old files is:
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
Thanks,
John
Never mind the question. I just noticed that the new hosts file has this entry.


:-) replace and forget. For those who haven't tried it, you may get some security warnings when you attempt to edit the file. What I usually do is rename the original file, which it will let you do without warnings, and then copy the new one in. Also need to restart the browser at least. Note that if you use Chrome, it will completely ignore your hosts file and show ads anyway. They don't tell you that when they give you that browser as an "upgrade." I only use Chrome when IE11 has issues, but I refuse to put up with tracking and advertising.

A good place to test if ads are gone is steepandcheap.com - The page now shows only their offers, while other boxes show sseveral gray spaces with "Ad" written on the background, but the ad is gone.

Another effect is that some of the advertising "sponsored" links shown in google searches (especially those top right on the first page) will fire off pages with "this page could not be found"