Remove Skype ads

So you are sick and tired of ads in Skype, and want to disable ads in Skype?


Well, the easiest way to get rid of Skype ads is pay for Skype! Any amount will do, send 1 cent to your account if you can and that will do! People who ever paid for Skype, use it ads free forever. If paying Microsoft is not your style, you can try patching Skype to remove ads. Be advised, that even though I succeeded in doing so, you have to follow my steps in the exactly same order, otherwise this won’t work. First go to Skype settings, find Privacy, and uncheck the last 3 checkboxes to disable your online status on the web, disable cookies and disable targeted ads. Then completely quit Skype, by right clicking the icon in the taskbar and selecting Quit. Make sure you completely unloaded the program. Find Skype configuration file. It is located in your Windows profile folder. If you don’t know where that is, stop now. You won’t be able to follow the rest of the steps, if you lack such basic computer skills. Skype’s configuration file is named config.xml. Open it in text editor and find this line
1
which equals 1. Add a minus sign before 1, so it gets -1.
-1
Save the file. Now from either Internet Explorer, or Windows search launch Internet Settings. Find Security section, click on blocked sites icon, and add the following URL: https://apps.skype.com as blocked. Save and now you can launch Skype. The ads should be gone, as well as the empty ad placeholder in the top of the dialog window, so more chat fits into the same sized window. This, however, is not stable, and sometimes the placeholder is back. No ads though. To make sure your computer never ever receives any info from current MS ads servers, use elevated administrative access to edit your hosts file. Point the DNS names of MS servers to localhost, making them never resolvable on your PC, so the ads just won’t go through. Here’s what you have to add to the hosts file, then save it and reboot.
127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1 live.rads.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ads1.msn.com
127.0.0.1 static.2mdn.net
127.0.0.1 g.msn.com
127.0.0.1 a.ads2.msads.net
127.0.0.1 b.ads2.msads.net
127.0.0.1 ac3.msn.com
127.0.0.1 apps.skype.com

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