This is what one of our visitors had to say about the issue:
Quote Jerry M.:
As mentioned here, any discussion of the HOSTS file is incomplete without mentioning UAC. Most people don’t even know what UAC is (and sadly they shouldn’t have to), indeed, finally downgrading from XP to Win7, I did not know UAC until today. UAC stands for User Account Control, located in control panel under User safety, submenu User accounts (Win7).Regardless of what you may try to do with FILE permissions or ownership many people are stonewalled changing their HOSTS file. This is because Their UAC is set to prevent this. By temporarily setting your UAC to “Never Notify”, you can readily modify and save to the hosts file, assuming it has not been set to Read only. Most articles assume that READ ONLY status or file permissions is your ONLY problem. But, of course, Windows is never as simple as that. Remember to set your UAC back to level 3 or whatever it was so MS will exclusively control half of your PC’s files again. Wherefore art thou XP? I miss thee so!
(Justifications about how necessary UAC is on a home PC are simply misdirected in light of the many thousands of Malwares that continue to attack Win7 users. But make yourselves feel good telling us how you know better anyway. :)
Various Guides And Tools That Will Help You To Modify The Hosts File
While this is a valid complaint, it is possible to modify the hosts file without disabling UAC. I want to refer people with similar problems to our tutorials. In the following tutorial we explain that it is often a good idea to log into the hidden admin account
If you do not want to mess around with any of that stuff, there are tools
Last, but not least we have various registry tweaks that add the option “Take Ownership” to your right-click context menu to