We all have friends. We all love to play pranks. But very few of us actually play pranks on our friends. Here’s a nifty little Windows trick that could easily land people in trouble.

What this trick basically does is, when a person tries to access any particular site via the browser, the browser will instead show up a website specified by you. Say your friend is a frequent visitor to orkut.com. You can very well do some magic so that instead of orkut.com, xxx.com opens up ( No, not xxx.com, I just mean any x site. :D )

This is really a great trick to do in the college/school labs, friends PC or even trick your family. Be careful where you are redirecting users to :P

Requirements:

1. Windows Administrator privileges
2. IP of the site you want to redirect the people to
3. Notepad

First, goto Start >> Run and type in cmd and press enter. In the command prompt, type ping domain.com where domain.com is the site you wanna redirect people too. For eg: google.com or simply use 64.22.110.209

Note down the IP address.

Now, open Notepad and click on File >> Open and navigate to the following path

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

and open the file name hosts

Now, add the following line at the end of the file.

64.22.110.209 orkut.com

( Replace the IP with any IP you like and the domain with any domain you want )

Save the file and exit.

Restart your browser.

( A lot of my readers already knew about it. I knew too. Its just for those who didn’t :| )

[Update]

I forgot to mention that this can also be used to block access to a certain website.

Just add the following line, instead of the one above..

127.0.0.1 sitename.com