If you like, you could get a USB flash drive with a physical write protect switch like below to use. It'll make it easy to turn on/off write protect...
Yes, I understand that there is not Hosts file there. The point of my post was that you cannot create it there. Whether one is there or not, you must...
That's seen as a system folder. Save the file to another location (I use my desktop), delete a hosts file if one does exist in that folder, then copy...