Conflicting lists. HOSTS file, missing or can't be edited, depending.

In microsoft.public.windowsxp.general, on Sat, 04 Feb 2017 13:56:24
-0500, micky wrote:

From: micky
Subject: Conflicting lists. HOSTS file, missing or can't be edited, depending.
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general,alt.comp.os.win dows-10
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.93/32.576 English (American)

First, how important in Win10 are the files and etc subdirectory in
C:\windows\system32\drivers??

I get conflicting lists of what files I have. (When I was looking for
the best file manager, I tried several, and I'm glad I didn't delete
any.)

Total Commander, Multi-Commander, and Search Everything show that all
the files expected to be there are there.

And XYplorer showed them all.

Free Commander, Q-Dir, xplorer2, and PowerDesk 9, show that 412 of 419
are missing, compared to Total Commander and compared to the clone
partition (E. The clone was made less than a week ago, so if they
are missing, something would have had to have happened in the last week.

Well, as much as I disllike webforums, I seem to have gotten the answer
at http://forum.multicommander.com/foru...ic,1941.0.html

One post there says, and the author of Multicommander seems to agree,
that the difference is between 32- and 64-bit versions of the program.
In every case where I saw two versions of the program, I chose the
64-bit version. Maybe some of these programs don't actually have a
64-bit version when they need one?

It's interesting that so many windows programs do show.



PowerDesk, which was my favorite program for years, is, they wrote me
being supported in that they are logging bugs, but they are not doing
updates!!! I think they should say that in their advertising,
especially now that I notified them of this flaw, one other biggg one,
and one possible small one, and one long-existing medium one. I guess
if they give me my money back as they promised, I'll tell them what the
problem is. (I only asked for the $40 back a day or two ago.) They
also say a 60 day refund in the advertising but the refund form says 30
days. I'm within 30 days, and I didn't want to antagonize them until I
get my money back.

In microsoft.public.windowsxp.general, on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 04:16:35
-0500, micky wrote:

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Wed, 8 Feb 2017 04:12:49 +0000, Mike
Tomlinson wrote:

En el artículo , J. P. Gilliver
(John) escribió:

If you save a file in notepad without an extension, it will save it as a
.txt file. In order to save it without, you might have to use quotes -

Yes, thank you for clarifying my post. I was suggesting, somewhat
obliquely, that the OP may not have realised that his/her saving a file
s/he thinks is called "hosts" may actually have been saved as
"hosts.txt" because of Notepad's daft default behaviour.

Thank you but that's not what happened. It didn't save the file at all
and it didn't directly refuse to. Instead it brought up the navigation
box that was aimed at documents and settings I think. If it planned to
rename the file I didn't notice, because there was no point in saving
any file to any other location. Though actually I was probably wrong
about that. I probably could have saved it to any other location and
then copied it to the right location

Windows hiding file extensions only serves to add to the confusion. I
have this turned off. Tools, Folder Options, View, untick "hide
extensions for known file types".

Almost the first thing I do is turn that off. It might have been okay
when windows first started, but by now most people have heard of the
existence of viruses, and still they don't change the default. Very
strange.

It's worth noting that some anti-virus makes the hosts file read-only,
which doesn't help. I have a feeling Win10 also does this by default,
but don't use it so am not sure.

Because of another issue, that I describe in the OP, that 3 file
managers couldn't even find the ETC directory, I looked at it many times
in the other 2 file managers and didn't notice that it was read only.

I wrote to one of the file manager companies last night and complained
about this (can't see files) and 2 other problems, so I'll see what they
say.

It was PowerDesk that I wrote to and they eventually wrote back that the
program is being supported by logging the problems, but that no new
release is planned. What kind of support is that?

If I have time today or tomorrow I'm going to see if the other two
programs that didn't work right have 64-bit versions.