In case your Administrator account can’t seem to edit stuff it’s “supposed” to edit…
Just wasted nearly half an hour trying to mod my hosts file on my vista laptop… ya I know… why run vista when I could run a flavor of Linux… Truthfully I have a few Linux boxes here on the network, this laptop is actually used primarily when we’re on trips… and it’s got a cool touch screen and a swivel display that allows the machine to be used as a tablet PC as well… Anyway, I digress… back to my annoyance for the day… I tried to mod my hosts table to point to the internal IP for the web server (a linux box) and couldn’t save it now way, no how… I even switched users to the Admin and administrator couldn’t write over the existing file… Turns out you have to run Notepad (or some other text editor) as THE administrator as follows:
Step 1. Right-click on Notepad
Step 2. Select Run as administrator
Step 3. open c:windowssystem32driversetchosts
Step 4. Save your file as you originally intended.
Task complete…
Hopefully, someone else will find this BEFORE they run into this quirky situation… The truth is the Administrator log-in isn’t THE Administrator… To find this I googled “vista admin can’t edit hosts file” and I found this out…