Hi, could could anyone give me some information on HOSTS and LMHOSTS files and WINS. If anyone could tell me the difference between them and how they work I'd be very grateful. I've heard it has something to do with NetBios and Netbeui. Thanks in advance. Musiccritic

These files tell your machine what IP address relates to what NetBios machine name. For example, my_pc 111.111.111.111 It has nothing to do with Netbui. Netbui is a seperate protocol.

Well sort of. Both files accomplish pretty much the same goal - to resolve a name to an IP address. It just depends on the type of name and what utility you are using. If you are talking about NetBios names - Windows computer names - the LMHOSTS file is used. (Or Wins if you have it installed). Which is used first depends on the node type of IP. If you are referring to Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) like www.microsoft.com, then the HOST file, (or DNS) is used. If you try to ping a computer by name, the first place the ping command looks to resolve the name to the IP address is the host file. It does have nothing to do with NetBeui since NetBeui does not use IP addresses. This is the very short explanation but it gets you started.