Yet another computer problem

I have three computers and an x-box 360 all plugged into the same router and modem. 360 is fine, as are two of the computers. The third one can’t get to the internet. The first things I tried were switching the ethernet cable from 3 to 2, which didn’t change the fact that 2 worked and 3 didn’t, a restart, a cold boot, and swearing.

When I try Firefox I get an “Address Not Found” error, and when I try Internet Explorer I get a “The page cannot be displayed” error. All of this from bookmarks that worked fine this morning when I left for work, and some hand typed addresses.

I have been googling around and tried some stuff. I have a 192. other stuff ip address, I can ping everything brought up by an iconfig command and also websites by URL or IP address and it tells me that 4 of 4 packets sent were received. The diagnostic programs I’ve found in Windows all tell me that there is no problem with my connection, and I was able to update Windows earlier this evening when I tried that, but neither browser will bring up a website. Windows also says any of the hardware I can think of (modem, network card, etc.) is working fine.

I’ve run Malwarebytes, and it found nothing. I have deleted AVG, reset the winsock catalog, and tried restarting in safe mode and none of it’s working. Based on the fact that I kept getting a sound shortly after a restart that I associate with uTorrent, I uninstalled and deleted that too. There are no firewalls I’m aware of running, I haven’t added any software I’m aware of lately, and I’m out of ideas.

Granted, I don’t know what some of the above actually means, but I’m really hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Try downloading (onto another machine) and installing Winsockfix from Softpedia.
Often works with your symptoms.

Major Geeks have a similar tool.

Before you do that though, clear the temporary Internet pages and cookies from the machine. That alone might do it.

So you can ping a site (e.g. news.bbc.co.uk) by name and number, right?.

Can you browse by number? i.e. if you put [noparse]http://212.58.226.73[/noparse] into your browser’s address bar, do you get to BBC News?

Are you sure you’re not running Windows Firewall?

Have you tweaked your router recently? Has it auto-updated? Perhaps it’s being blocked there.

Open a command line, and type


ipconfig /flushdns

and press enter. Worth a shot.

edit: Also, it’s not set to the same IP address as another PC or the X-Box, is it? Does your ISP require you to set it to an IP address? Most broadband providers want it set to DHCP, meaning it’s set to pull its own address.

I am sure I’ve turned Windows Firewall off. I haven’t touched the router, though I don’t know if it auto-updated. Everything else runs through it just fine.

I can ping by name and number.

Browsing by number seems to work about half the time, with the other half generating the same error as trying to use a bookmarked link.

Flushing the dns cache didn’t help. All devices are showing different IP addresses, and I believe the IP addresses are automated, as when I brought the last computer home I just plugged it in and it worked, no messing around with the connection details.

Winsockfix seems to have done the job. Thank you all for the assistance, it’s greatly appreciated.