Beginning yesterday morning, my husband hasn’t been able to access his Hotmail account, which is a huge pain since it’s his main email account. In fact, none of the MSN sites will load on our home computer at all, and I can’t figure out why. Here’s all the pertinent info I can think of:
No MSN sites
All other websites load fine
Ran Spybot and Ad Aware, both came back clean
Deleted all cookies
Deleted temporary internet files and cleared history
Shut down and rebooted (with at least an hour in between) several times
Nothing’s made a difference. Any ideas on what might be happening?
P.S. I can access his Hotmail from my work computer just fine, but still. Ugh.
Using IE 6.0 – I’ll try a different browser as soon as I get home. My man isn’t the most tech savvy so I don’t want to walk him through installing a new browser over the phone.
The error is “Cannot find server.” This error appears for these two URLs: http://www.msn.com/
Sounds like the hosts file could be screwed up. The hosts file associates domain names with IP addresses for faster access. Other problems are also possible. See here for fixes which address the “Cannot Find Server” error.
So I got home and installed Firefox, and it’s experiencing the same problems. Also went through the site that Q.E.D. had suggested, checked all of the fixes mentioned, and nothing was wrong.
It turns out that Comcast recently bought out Time Warner in my area – we have phone, internet and cable through them. Things went hinky as soon as the switch in service took place. My husband spent 45 minutes talking to two different Comcast tech support people today, to no avail. I’ll try talking to them tomorrow.
Not that I expect anyone to care, really. Just thought I might as well pop back into this little thread o’ mine.
A few months ago I was having the same problem except that I couldn’t get Yahoo. I tried most of the things you mentioned. I discovered a highly technical solution to the problem. I unpluged the ethernet cable from the back of my computer and then plugged it back in.
It sounds as though you lost the lease on your IP number.
When you connect to a run of the mill ISP with the DHCP protocol, the ISP issues you an IP number. The lease is the amount of time the IP is good for. When it expires, the number is invalid and the connection breaks.
You renew the lease by cold starting your connection. When everything is up, you have a new number and new connection.
There is also a way to do it by software if the connection goes straight to the computer, by using a program called IPCONFIG. If you have a router in the way, you have to refer to the router manual on how to refresh the number.
DJ Motorbike, sometimes the simplest tactics are the best, and I’d completely overlooked trying that. I’ll do that this afternoon. It would be great if that’s all it takes!
VunderBob, intriguing! I didn’t know any of that. If I’m understanding you correctly, that jibes with what DJ Motorbike suggested – that I need to completely end and then re-establish the connection. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the IPCONFIG deal.
Thanks for all the suggestions, people.
P.S. In the meantime, I’ve set up a Gmail account for my husband and forwarded all his Hotmail correspondence to it, so at least he’s not totally in the cold, email-wise.
I should clarify that it wound up being not just MSN sites. Gmail, banking, the good ol’ SDMB, recipes sites… any sites that need to handle transactions would fail.
So, many hours on the phone with Comcast and Dell later, I finally decided to have a Geek Squad person come out and look at the situation. He was there for a few hours (some of them also on the phone with Comcast), and the culprit appears to be… the modem. We could ping Comcast, but Comcast couldn’t ping us. A key event was when we restarted the modem and it blew out the phone line completely. We currently have no modem and no phone service at the house, but hey! Geek Squad was free!
Husband’s going out to buy a new modem today, and hopefully that will be the end of it.
