lately whenever i try to open a web page i get a message at the bottom left hand corner of the page that says "done, but with errors on the page" sometimes the page is totally blank and others only half the page loads. For instance on this page when i click the icon in the bottom left where the error message is it says: Line 390 Char 5 Error Access is denied Code O URL http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/computing etc etc can anyone help me with this, its driving me nutso thanks :-)

OK, its a slow day. So a real easy one. Been seeing the same error message for the past few days at Netscape.com . Has not bothered me until you asked and said it was causing you a problem. If you want to get rid of the errors and pages not completing. Go to the Windows folder and delete the file you placed there named "HOSTS" (note: no extension). Reboot and the problem should be gone. The URL with doubleclick.net is the clue. Looks like the AD people are fighting back. They are paying to have their clients Ads placed on web pages and web users are blocking their Ads using the HOSTS file. So by having some of the HTML required to correctly display the web site's page included in the Ads they send, you get errors or messed up web pages if you block their Ads. Your choice, block the Ads and not be able to view some sites without errors, quit going to sites that allow this to happen, or put up with the Ads by removing the HOSTS blocking.

I have "hosts" and "HOSTS.SAM" Should they both be deleted?

Col came up with this the other day, I did a serch and came up with 27 entries. The ones to delete are the ones without (#) in front of them, exept the "Local host" entry. I moved them to a folder for a week before deleting, and then scrubed them. I just made another search on reading this and they are there without any fresh entries. Thanks Jack for your post that explains their existence a little better..Jim

HOSTS.SAM is just a SAMple file. It contains no entries, other than the required "localhost" entry. If you have a HOSTS file, it is a copy of the sample file, with entries to be redirected or blocked added. The lines that start with a # are just comments and could be deleted for faster processing of the file if you want to. The URL (name) on the right is "mapped" or converted directly to the IP address on the left. Normally TCP/IP has to send out the URL name to a server to get the IP address in a response back. Then send the request to the IP address. By placing entries in this table, your computer can do this mapping of the URL to IP address, saving time by not sending the request to a server and waiting for the response. It can directly access the site as it has its IP address. This is how some of the Internet accelerators work. They track the sites you visit and "speedup" the process by doing the mapping on your machine by placing entries in your HOSTS file. The Internet routers do not understand URL's, just IP addresses. To block a site or URL, you add a line with the URL address on the right and insert the IP address of 127.0.0.1, which is your "local host" machine. Its no response causes the standard "no response" error message to be displayed for that request. If you use the IP address 127.0.0.0 which is an invalid address on your machine, it is even faster. As URL mappings to IP address change, you can get blocked from sites if they are in this list, with a mapping to their IP address . So it is, as Col was trying to do, recommend that you delete entries in the HOSTS file where this has been done. (The non- 127.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.0 entries.) The second issue is AD and site blocking. By placing the URL of undesirable sites or AD engine sites in this list you can block them. Web pages with a lot of Ads on them load faster (no Ads to wait for). Now it looks like the Ad engine sites are starting to fight back and are trying to prevent the mass blocking of all Ad related sites as done with the HOSTS file from www.smartin-designs.com which blocks a long list of Ad engine sites and porn sites. This change by the Ad engines is causing errors on web pages if the Ad sites are blocked. You must either remove the block or live with the errors.

I understand how to block unwanted sites with the hosts file, not that I use it. But if I want to speed up web surfing, how do I find the IP address of URLs to put in the hosts file?

Don't recall the site url that will do this for you. Maybe someone who does will post. But, doing a "ping" or "tracert" in DOS window will get it for you. If you enter: ping url it must first go get the IP address and then it displays it before doing the actual ping command.