Vista internet love, A little help neeed.

[Reverend Jim]

I had a 256MB Gateway computer running XP along with Time Warner's roadrunner high speed internet. Life was good. Alas it became time to get a new beast so now I have:

Dell Inspirion 530 with 4GB running Vista home premium.

My internet connection now makes me want to pull my hair out. At least 40-50% of the time, clicking the browser cannot find the home page. Then, you click it again and it works. Switching between web pages can go from no problem to "cannot find site" at the drop of a hat.

I have tried both Explorer and Firefox.

I have swapped out AV software and firewalls.

I even had the cable guy make sure the modem and cables are good.

What settings, switches, or changes will make my computer play nice with the internet again?

[Vash the Stampede]

Step 1: Get XP.
There is no step 2.

Lol, but seriously, I'm sorry; this is definitely beyond my skill to debug on a forum and you would need at least an interactive phone call and/or real tech support.

[Esbeemer]

Hmm. It might actually be an intermittant fault in your ethernet chipset on your new machine, especially since you get the same results with a different variety of software. I'd give Dell a call.

Also, you can give Windows 7 Ultimate a try for free until June next year. Yeah, it's a release candidate, but I've been running it for two months, and the only issue I've had is that my printer driver keeps asking for .Net 2.0 upgrades when I boot (.Net 3.5 comes with Win7, so it's just a nuisance screen).

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

If it doesn't work for you - Go back to Vista.

My friend who works for MS hates Vista, and looooves Win7. My brief experience confirms this opinion.

This post has been edited by Esbeemer on Jul 2 2009, 02:04 PM

[Reverend Jim]

Dell help had me run a ping backloop test from the command prompt. It showed the ethernet card working. I ran it several times.

Dell thinks it could be software related. He had me reset Internet explorer and it seems to have helped, but not cured the problem. The "failure-to-load-page" frequency has dropped off, but it still shows up.

Would carpetbombing and reinstalling the software do any good? I had the toys pre-installed at the factory.

[Vash the Stampede]

Apparently there is a step 2: install Firefox (and/or Chrome. I haven't used Chrome personally). Do not use IE. Not sure if it'll help your specific problem, but IE is the devil.

[Esbeemer]

Well, I'm still leaning toward some sort of hardware issue, just because you changed or flipped every single piece of flippin' software that would normally cause such things. Unless there is some sort of driver conflict.

My home router has an issue where it drops connection for about 20 seconds every hour on the hour. Not enough to mess with my web surfing, but it's playing havoc with my online gaming. I've got a new router, but since I'm moving this month, I figure I'll wait until I get into the new place to play with the new router.

You might look at seeing if you can pick up a PCI ethernet card (Heck, I pick 'em up at my local Wal-Mart for $15), disabling the on-board ethernet in the BIOS and run that way for a bit to see if you get the same problems. Because every desktop in my house has built-in ethernet, I always keep a card or two around just in case.

And, heck, the 'Reinstall The Site From Orbit' plan may not hurt, if you haven't got a whole lot of stuff set up or installed....

This post has been edited by Esbeemer on Jul 4 2009, 04:21 PM

[fubbleskag]

burn a LiveCD of pretty much any flavour of linux you want - lets you run linux without modifying your hdd; if it's hardware, you'll still have issues, if not nuke/pave your windows install (or fall madly in love with the livecd and install that)

[Reverend Jim]

Topic Zombification.

Huzzah! My troubles are over and it only cost me $40.

The culprit? The modem that my internet service provides.

I had initially ruled out the modem because; one, I replaced it, and two, the modem worked just fine on my old computer. However, when I took my computer to a friend's house to look at, there were no issues. Everything ws lightning-fast and perfect. He has a different ISP and a different modem.

He said that my modem and my computer did not like each other and needed some help to get along. He suggested a router. So I picked up a $40 Belkin router and set it up. Now I have happy internet surfing and my wife is off my back. And we all lived happlily ever after.

The End.