Item Faster browsing on the Internet or your Network

By doing the following steps you can browse on the Internet or Network faster. It uses the same tecnique as http://localhost. When you type http://localhost you will be redirected to your own ip. By adding some lines you could reach your ip by just typing http://l. Observe that some names can effect your network.

1. Find out which ip you would like to have a name for. It could be a website,  a place on your network or anything else that got an ip-number. The localhost uses the ip 127.0.0.1. To find out a website's ip just type  "ping www.website.com" (without the "")in the command prompt (start>run>cmd.exe).
2. Browse to WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Open the file called hosts in notepad.
3. Below "127.0.0.1       localhost" type the ip followed by a name. Read in the file itself for more information.
4. If you for example type 216.239.51.99 search (the ip belongs to www.google.com) and saves the file, you will end up on google's site if you type search in the adress bar in your Internet Browser.

Item Checking for Connection Problems

Anytime your network refuses to send and receive data properly , your first troubleshooting step should be to check fof problems with the physical connection between the local computer and the rest of the network. Assuming your network connection uses  the TCP/IP protocol , your most potent weapon is the Ping ulity. When you use the Ping command with no parameters , Windows sends four echo datagrams , small Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets, to the address you specify. If the machine at the other end of the connection replies, you know that the network connection between the two points is alive.

To use the Ping command , open a Windows command prompt window (Cmd.exe in Windows XP) and tape the command    ping target_name  (where target_name  is an IP address or the name of another host machine ).

If all the packets you send come back properly in roughly the same time , your TCP/IP connection is fine and you can focus your troubleshooting efforts elsewhere. 
Enjoy !