I have a really crappy dialup ISP. Are there utilities or things I can do to determine if my problems lie with the ISP, or with web sites I am trying to access?
I’m sure a guru will be along shortly. Until then:
If you’re on Windows (and OS-X too, I think), go to a command line and type “tracert [some domain]” e.g. tracert yahoo.com, enter.
This will show you all the hops from your local machine to your ISP and then all the way to the destination server. You may see where the signal gets “stuck” inside a bad router or server, and perhaps puzzle out what server is the problem.