I am getting tired of opening favourite editor and navigating to the folder for the hosts file to check it. (as a devops i do this a lot)

Why not have an application that does this and only this? For Windows it should also be easy to restart it as admin to update the hosts file.

Investigating the event log in Windows is fiddly to say the least.  The list takes a lot of space but doesn’t show much.  It takes a while to load in Windows 7.  The contents of each event can only be seen after opening the event and only one at a time in WinXP and with too much wasted space in Win7.

If one exported the event log to a queryable database, an ISAM would suffice, it would be a breeze to search and list.  It shouldn’t be too hard to write such a program.  Either export when a button is pressed or set it to subscribe to event log events.

Then create a better viewer too.