狗爺語錄

Everybody using Live Messenger should be annoyed enough with its constantly flashing and disturbing ads. While there are multiple methods trying to block or hide ads (a-patch, WLM Universal Patcher++, …), not all are satisfactory. In particular, my experience about a-patch was extremely bad — it never gave me any other result than program crash. On the other hand, hacks like using Resource Hacker to modify DLL’s are too cumbersome, though it works fine for me.

Enlightened after reading My Digital Life’s post on similar topic (it was talking about Live Mail instead of Messenger), I decided to give it a try. To sum it up, I was satisfied, but some more update is needed. The following content is the list of hosts that should be appended to \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts:

127.0.0.1       rad.live.com
127.0.0.1       rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       a.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       b.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       c.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       d.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       e.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       f.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       g.rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1       view.atdmt.com

Part of the list is gathered from other web pages, and others from my own discovery. This should work with the newest Live Messenger. Note that it doesn’t hide the ads area, what it does is just preventing retrieval of ads. The area looks like the image below.

Live Messenger without ad