Simple HostsEd

Simple HostsEd is a lightweight and portable application that enables you to edit the Windows Hosts file, which contains configuration details about TCP/IP mappings.

It features intuitive options that can be tackled even by users with little experience in networking utilities.

Since there's no setup pack involved, you can drop the downloaded .exe file in a custom location on the hard drive and simply double-click it to launch the program. Otherwise, you can keep it stored on a USB flash disk to run it on any PC with minimum effort. It doesn't make any changes in the Windows registry or create extra files on the disk without your permission.

The user-friendly GUI is made from a normal window with a neatly organized layout, where you can get started by loading the actual Hosts file.

After viewing host names and IP addresses, you can change their properties, add new entries to the list, or remove existing ones.

Before doing so, you might be interested in creating a backup with the current settings, in order to restore the Hosts file to its previous state if you're not satisfied with the new modifications. Simple HostsEd supplies options for backup and restoration in this regard. There are no other notable options provided by this piece of software.

It left a small footprint on system resources in our tests, thanks to the fact that it needed a low amount of CPU and RAM to work properly. No error dialogs popped up and it didn't hang or crash.

Although it doesn't have a particularly rich set of options and configuration properties, Simple HostsEd offers a simple and effective solution for modifying the Hosts file, and it can be easily handled. Plus, it's free.