Web Access Problem

[revolver]

A few days ago I started having a problem with my web access. Many sites become unavailable and I get the 'Error - could not locate remote server' screen. The odd thing is my email always works during this problem and I can always get to google, facebook, myspace and quite often terb. If I do a google search I'll get a listing of sites but 90% of them won't work. The problem is intermittant, I'm getting it now as I'm writing this but early this morning I had no problem. Yesterday around 4pm I had the problem but later at around 10pm no problem. Windows reports that there's nothing wrong with my connection.

Has anyone ever had this problem? Any ideas what could be causing it?

 

[Horney_Senior]

There's a bunch of possibilities. A website can be down, but unlikely this is this cause since the odds of them all being down are greater than your chances of winning the lottery.

I have seen this in the past with viruses. Is your anti-virus software current and has a recent scan been done? If you are not using Trend Micro PC-Cillin then you might want to visit the Trend Micro site and run their housecall program.

 

[WoodPeckr]

revolver,
Could be just typical network farkups.

I'm in WNY and it happens here off and on also. A site works then later on you can't get in, then later it's working again. Was with a friend in NF CA recently who had the exact same kinds of intermittent problems you mentioned and the PC was fine other than the network not connecting at times of some sites, then later on connecting OK.

 

[revolver]

Unfortunately, the PC-Cillin site is one that won't load. I'm using Avast and I did a new scan this afternoon. It did find an adware virus and removed it but that does seem to have fixed the problem.

I was on the phone with a sympatico tech this afternoon for about half an hour and couldn't resolve the problem. Went through the usual suggestions like clearing cache, temp files, etc. Changed a few settings and what not. She was able to access sites that I wasn't able to so the sites are not down. Their equipment shows that my connection is fine.

It's not browser specific as I get the problem in all of Opera, IE and Firefox.

Thanks for the suggestions though. Still trying to figure it out.

 

[MarkII]

You might want to check out whats in your startup when the machine boots up. You can find this in the HELP->TOOLS-> SYSTEM INFO settings (Might be wrong about the system info part, been a while since I've used a PC)

You can also have a look at what process's are running. If you don't know what a certain process is, simply google the name and you'll get quick results. You can access the process's running by bringing up the Task manager. As I recall that was CTRL+Alt+DEL.

If I'm wrong on how to bring up the info someone will be quick to redirect you. But I'd look at both of those from a performance standpoint.

 

[revolver]

It turned out the problem was with resolving domain names. Sympatico gave me some server addresses to use instead of the 'automatic detect' setting and everything has been working fine since.