michealbeethoven
asked on
www short names work long ones don't
Okay, heres a stumper. Started to work on a PC that the owner could not get to surf the World Wide Web. He could go to his homepage but no place else. I figured it was cached and stuck in Park. Did a scan and found several bad guys lurking. The owner balked at prolonged cleaning and decided to have a factory restore of XP from the recovery partition. Forty-five minutes later we had a squeaky clean machine that still would not venture much past the home page. I could get it to go to google.com and other short domain names such as red.com but any place that had a substantial name such as weatherunderground.com or comcast.net was a no go. He was using a wireless USB adapter for connection to a Netgear cable modem/WiFi router so we traded the adapter out for a known good one from another tower in his home. No change. Even installed Firefox to replace IE7. No change. The integrated network controller was not being used but I uninstalled/installed the driver in case the device was somehow involved with the IP stack. Still no change.
There are two other towers connected to the cable modem/WiFi router, one by cable, the other by USB WiFi adapter. Neither exhibits this problem. Rebooting the modem didnt help either. Checked Security/Privacy/Content controls of IE and found nothing out of the ordinary. Parental Controls and Content Advisor are both off. All temp files, history, cookies, and forms were deleted. Again, no change. At present there are no firewalls, anti-spyware, or antivirus apps installed.
Any ideas?
There are two other towers connected to the cable modem/WiFi router, one by cable, the other by USB WiFi adapter. Neither exhibits this problem. Rebooting the modem didnt help either. Checked Security/Privacy/Content controls of IE and found nothing out of the ordinary. Parental Controls and Content Advisor are both off. All temp files, history, cookies, and forms were deleted. Again, no change. At present there are no firewalls, anti-spyware, or antivirus apps installed.
Any ideas?
SOLUTION
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ASKER
Hello flubbster: Would not the localhost file be empty after factory restore?
Hello stephenbyrd: I will try both your and flubbster suggestion to input IP address rather than name.
Hello stephenbyrd: I will try both your and flubbster suggestion to input IP address rather than name.
Any luck?
ASKER
Went to google.com and then put in http://76.96.54.13 . Nothing happens.
Still do not understand what is going on....
Still do not understand what is going on....
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ASKER
Hello stephenbyrd: It did not get as far as tracert. The owner had scheduled a visit from Comcast (unknown to me) and they changed out the modem. All is OK, now.
Maybe I learned something from this, maybe not. The owner was concerned about the amount of time at his home I was taking to research his problem. I relied on his feedback that the other PCs were communicating easily with the modem (one-hard cable, one-wireless) and did not doublecheck his input. Probably should have now that I look back on the time line. After I left his place he had the ISP tech come in and replace the box and since everything worked (after I did a system recovery that stopped the slowness and freezes) he decided that I had done nothing to warrant reward. It did not matter that I was contacting him daily since the first day giving him updates and tests over the phone to conduct. He decided that he had fixed it himself.
You win some you lose some.
I appreciate your and flubbster's input. Since you provided the majority of advice I had submitted the majority of points to you.
Maybe I learned something from this, maybe not. The owner was concerned about the amount of time at his home I was taking to research his problem. I relied on his feedback that the other PCs were communicating easily with the modem (one-hard cable, one-wireless) and did not doublecheck his input. Probably should have now that I look back on the time line. After I left his place he had the ISP tech come in and replace the box and since everything worked (after I did a system recovery that stopped the slowness and freezes) he decided that I had done nothing to warrant reward. It did not matter that I was contacting him daily since the first day giving him updates and tests over the phone to conduct. He decided that he had fixed it himself.
You win some you lose some.
I appreciate your and flubbster's input. Since you provided the majority of advice I had submitted the majority of points to you.
You mentioned you cannot connect to comcast.net, so try pinging comcast.net from a command prompt and see if you get positive results. Also, type http://76.96.54.13 in your web browser and see if that works. If it does, you definitely have DNS issues.