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Windows 7 and http://localhost/

I am now having a play with Windows 7 on a virtual environment. Okay, it’s Microsoft on a budget – trial versions of Windows 7, MS Office 2007 and Visio 2007, all so that I can write a technical document on my own computer. My, things have changed from XP! Where on earth is everything?!?

One of the little oddities is that now http://localhost/ no longer works out of the box. Apparently, this was also the case with Vista. Why? It has something to do with IPv6, but back to the actual problem. The solution is to amend the hosts file as it is now commented out in there. However, all is not quite as easy as it sounds, even for an administrator. It seems that Microsoft is taking a lesson out of the Linux distros book and you have to edit the file the hard way – via a DOS prompt!

Yep, you now have to click Start and type CMD in the search box, right-click cmd.exe and click run as administrator. A DOS prompt appears. Type edit c:\windows\system32\drivers\etchosts

Take out the # for the line 127.0.0.1 localhost and save.

It seems strange in an era where the GUI is now universal, that we have to start remembering the old DOS way of doing things.

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This entry was posted by Abbs on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Windows 7 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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