[mlbford2]

I am fairly computer savvy, but I have to say that I don't know what a host file is for. Can you edumecate me?

[lelio]

A hosts file relates DNS names (ie freerepublic.com) to IP addresses (ie 209.157.64.200). Back in the Old Days this was done by copying files around computers which then looked at that file to do the lookup manually.

This worked fine when you had a dozen universities on the internet, but it fails miserably with millions of dot com names. So DNS servers came about which told you what IP address you're looking for. No more text files.

Well not quite. All *nix distributions have /etc/hosts which pretty much just lists the loopback address (localhost 127.0.0.1) and maybe their own name -> IP address in it.

Windows has a similiar "stub" file like this too. You'll have to dig around for it, but you can find it under the TCP/IP - DNS settings. Look for something like "hosts" or "lmhosts." Should be a text file with maybe 3 entries in it.