Windows host file before dns

The Distinguished Expert awards are presented to the top veteran and rookie experts to earn the most points in the top 50 topics. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange. All rights reserved. Covered by US Patent. Come for the solution, stay for everything else. Welcome to our community! How do I make windows look in a local hosts file before it queries DNS without third party add-on software?

Example hosts file I had to go to dos prompt to get rid of the extension When I type www. I can work around it by adding my own DNS server or using addons but that's not the Q. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 11 years, 9 months ago. Active 6 years, 1 month ago. Viewed 25k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen I wonder, if you finally found a way to change this Windows 7 bit behavior, as I would require both methods nslookup and ping providing the same name resolution result! Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. Your example doesn't work on Windows 7 x Jano Rajmond Jano Rajmond 5 5 bronze badges. Mark Mark 1. I had the same problem and this worked for me in Win 7.

When you add your new entries to the hosts file, make sure you use all spaces, no tabs. That got it working for me. Dave M 13k 21 21 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 45 45 bronze badges. Paul T Paul T 1.

Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. You could make the actual IP address for Bing. Windows will always check the hosts file first before sending a request to a name server. The process described in the previous paragraph is a local DNS lookup. Your computer looks up the IP address by itself, from your local disk, without needing to contact an external server. One important reason to add entries to your hosts file is speed.

It will always be faster to do a local lookup than going out to an external server. Especially if that server is unreliable. Putting your most important or most frequently used sites in the hosts file means you never have to worry about your DNS service causing access issues. You can also use the hosts file to block sites that you never want that computer to access.

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