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”:


Step 4

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:

Step 5

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]