If you’re anything like me, you deeply resent seeing advertising in Skype. I mean come on, Windows and its built-in apps are not an advertising platform. Or at least, that’s not what they’ve been in the past.
I can understand ads in web browsers – even if only barely – but ads in the application I use to chat to colleagues, contacts and friends? No thanks.
So I went in search of a way to disable them, and lo and behold, I found exactly that. The steps that follow are what you should do if you, too, would like Skype to revert to being a pure communication tool.
FYI, this has been confirmed to work on consumer versions of Skype 6.x and 7.x.
Step 1
Click the Start button or press the Windows key on your keyboard.
Step 2
Type “internet options” and click on the link that pops up.
Step 3
Click on the Security tab, and then on “Restricted sites”:
Now click the “Sites” button, and add these two domains to the list:
apps.skype.com
g.msn.com
Your Restricted Sites window should look like this:
Click Close, and then OK.
Now fire up Skype, and enjoy the fact that it is, once again, a pure communications tool.
Just be aware that some of its functions will have a bit of a wobble – the “Home” screen will throw out an error, for instance and a colleague I had test this out on Windows 7 had to reset her Skype password – but the core features of Skype are still there, and they still work.
And that’s what’s important here.
[Image – Wikimedia Commons]