Nothing will connect except steam

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:28

My friends internet suddenly stopped working but funnily enough she can still connect and talk on steam. Nothing else works though :confused:

.

We tried flush dns, resetting winsock, "repairing" the connection, system restore, and running a virus scan.

She is connecting through a router and the other computers on it all work fine.

Her pc is running windows XP.

Have tried searching on google and have found nothing relevant... plz help

.

swinnie · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:29

Do you get any errors?

Anything blocked by firewall?

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:30

swinnie said:
Do you get any errors?

Anything blocked by firewall?

no and no

something daft already!! · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:33

Have you tried ping or tracert? Tracert may give you a clue to where its failing.

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:39

howiepoohs said:
Have you tried ping or tracert? Tracert may give you a clue to where its failing.

Ran a tracert and got

"unable to resolve target system name google.com"

tried to ping google.com aswell and it said can't find it, check name and retry

tolien · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:39

Some issue with DNS then.

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:41

tolien said:
Some issue with DNS then.

Tried flushing dns already, what else is there?

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:48

Yep, tried typing in google's IP 209.85.171.100 into explorer and it came up fine. Now how to fix dns?

swinnie · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:57

Put the following IP Addresses as your DNS servers.

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Note the old ones.

(Yes, that is two IP Addresses)

They're OpenDNS Servers.

Souness · 17 Apr 2009 at 23:59

swinnie said:
Put the following IP Addresses as your DNS servers.

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Note the old ones.

(Yes, that is two IP Addresses)

They're OpenDNS Servers.

Sorry how would I do this?

tolien · 18 Apr 2009 at 00:06

They'll be set on the router somewhere, within DHCP settings most likely.

Souness · 18 Apr 2009 at 00:06

tolien said:
They'll be set on the router somewhere, within DHCP settings most likely.

tried it, no dice

Souness · 18 Apr 2009 at 00:47

Update:

So she tries restoring, and this time it works and her internet is back to normal.

Windows update pops up and reminds her to install some updates, so she clicks ok and it restarts. Now the internet is not working again!!!

Looks like whatever update it was has caused the problem, so she goes to restore again and hopefully this time ignore the update, but the restores won't even complete... it just says "imcomplete restore....no changes were made".

Instead she tries uninstalling the latest update. This works but has no affect on the internet. So now the update is removed, system restore is apparently not working, and the internet still doesnt work!!

Completely at a loss here :S

tolien · 18 Apr 2009 at 12:39

So you changed the DNS settings the router gives out, is the machine actually picking them up?

ipconfig /all in a command prompt will show what the machine's using.

pennywise · 18 Apr 2009 at 13:25

Proxy settings?

tolien · 18 Apr 2009 at 13:36

Steam should follow IE's settings, so if one works so should the other.