Dell desktop, running Windows Vista 64 bit, with Firefox / Zone-Alarm.
Verizon FIOS, router right there, computer hard-plugged into the router (vs. wi-fi).
Earlier today, it quit talking to 99% of the internet, for no reason. My daughter had visited some sites with no trouble. It even refreshed my gmail, once. Then it wouldn’t find any sites at all. Itunes wouldn’t connect either.
At DOS prompt, nslookup returned IP addresses so there was connectivity, of a sort.
I checked Zone Alarm first-off to make sure nothing was blocked there. Nope, everything was go.
I turned the router off and on. No joy.
Finally in frustration I rebooted, and all was well.
Meantime, my laptop was working happily via wi-fi (WPA, if that matters, and of course I didn’t try it while the router was turned off, but I presume that would not have worked ;)).
Any ideas on what to check next time this happens?
Try accessing a website through its IP address and see if it comes up that way. If it does, the DNS server is messing up, probably a matter of ISP issues.
I probably shouldn’t try to answer this, since it’s a total shot in the dark, but last year I had a near-identical experience and it drove me freakin’ nuts.
I won’t go into the backstory, but at the end, I wound up calling in a PC repair guy, who spent maybe half an hour on the machine and told me that over time, sometimes Windows files just get corrupted, and that is what happened with mine (it is a laptop I bought in 2003). Seems the machine just could not pull an IP address from the service provider.
He reinstalled Windows, I spent some time restoring old stuff, blah, blah, blah, and yup, it worked like a charm from then on.
I wish I’d of called someone in before I spent several hours a day for almost a week trying to fix this on my own and driving my cable provider service department nuts as well.
I did give that a shot last night (using the IP addresses returned from several NSLookups) and no luck. I’ll try again the next time. Oddly gmail was still responding.
I shut the computer down, went upstairs and tried it with my laptop and got to the sites with no problem. However, I didn’t try the IP version, just the URL.
I’ll keep trying various permutations with this and see if anything else jumps out at me.
Just to get techie for a bit, but if nslookup and ping and the like are working on that machine but ‘the internet’ isn’t, then it sounds like Port 80 (www) is getting blocked.
Could be - Typo Knig works for an ISP and should have some ideas on how to check that. What on earth would cause it to happen sporadically like this, though?
I will try turning off ZoneAlarm (and enabling the built-in firewall) and see what happens. I must admit, this didn’t happen before I put Zonealarm and AVG in, in place of MacAfee (which was bundled with the machine).
Did you get a Windows update Tuesday night? My laptop (running 32 bit Vista, no Zone Alarm) restarted itself and wouldn’t connect either. I tried rebooting first, and all was fine. This has happened before, and I’ve learned that a reboot - even after it supposedly rebooted - usually solves the problem.
If it happens again, reboot first and then worry if that doesn’t work.