testing website before changing DNS

Testing websites before changing the DNS - this is something which I need to do often. I've relied on the Telnet based method in the past. But when the content needs to be checked, it's better to do the hosts file based method. Dreamhost has good documentation on this, and also on flushing DNS.

So, on Windows XP, edit C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
and run

ipconfig /flushdns

Will need to restart browser after flushing dns cache, too.