A lack of internet

ganesh · 23 Jun 2009 at 23:17

Hello,

My father's computer for whatever reason will not connect to any internet sites any more. Confusingly the speedtouch modem he uses detects and connects to the adsl line and tells me it is connected in the taskbar, i can ping various sites/servers with it and receive a response.

It started a few days ago for no reason that i can discern, nothing was changed/unplugged or installed. I've used IE, Opera, Mozilla and chrome, none of them will connect to any sites. His broadband is with adsl24 (a reseller of entanet) and i have spoken to them and so has my father on several occasions, they have done line checks and say that everything is fine and that there is no reason on their end for this to happen. I'm taking my router over there tomorrow to see if it's his modem that's broken.

He doesn't run an antivirus and i've switched off his firewall, his OS is windows xp home.

I just wanted to know if there was anything that you chaps could think of that could cause this?

Thanks.

user1453 · 23 Jun 2009 at 23:25

If you can ping websites it sounds like a dns problem, try inputting the ip addreas for a website in to the addreas bar and see if that works, if it does, you know you have a DNS problem

K1LLSW1TCH · 23 Jun 2009 at 23:36

Try going to an earlier restore point before you do anything else, maybe that'll work, It also may be worth trying the flush dns command as well as the usual scans for spyware.

Tesla · 23 Jun 2009 at 23:56

Can you take a known working laptop to test, sounds like a problem with his pc and not the connection.

ganesh · 24 Jun 2009 at 22:35

Have tried my best to test, all to no avail, i couldn't use my router with them as it seemed to be locked to BE, and his modem was too old to work with my laptop. My conclusion to them - Buy a new computer and router, (it's knackered and ridiculously slow and clunky anyway).

Tesla · 25 Jun 2009 at 10:24

Oh you could try safe mode with networking for testing...

tolien · 25 Jun 2009 at 11:27

It's a USB modem? Bag it and get an ADSL router as a first step, they're not that ridiculously expensive anyway.

J.B · 25 Jun 2009 at 11:38

Sounds like a DNS issue, possibly some kind of malware.

K1LLSW1TCH · 25 Jun 2009 at 11:48

tolien said:
It's a USB modem? Bag it and get an ADSL router as a first step, they're not that ridiculously expensive anyway.

Sound advice

May I recommend something similar to a Netgear? maybe a DG834G, they're inexpensvie and I had the same one for years and years until I got a free wireless version. Not expensive, not the best router ever in terms of features, but it works and it's reliable.

Also I've just realised that the OP says that the father doesn't run an AV. Maybe doing a quick virus scan would be worth your while also

I wouldn't have given the advice to buy a new computer just because of a no webpage issue. These kind of things are fairly common and used to crop up a fair bit when I worked for a famous I.S.P.