Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Beginning - Can Ping, but can't Browse

So this is a project I have played with in my mind for awhile now. I run across a lot of useful information I would love to share with others that are in Information Technology field themselves, Home Power Users(The people that the family uses for free), or the normal users. Now not to say all the info here will be tech related, but most of it will. I do have a life so some of it may sneak out here but we will see.

Anyways for my first post: I had a friend that was unable to browse the internet, but was using an Alltel data card. So I gave them their number, yes I had it on my phone because I deal with them very often, I recommended that he call them and if he still had a problem to give me a holler. After sometime I got a call back from him letting me know he still had the issue, so I told him to bring it in.

After getting it, I verified the problem. The Alltel card would connect but no internet grabbed a network cable and plugged it in just to ensure the problem wasn't limited to that interface. Same problem. I then jump into the Command Prompt (cmd) and ping good ole' www.google.com and get a steady response. Hmmm, So I grab my USB stick and load Firefox onto the computer. YAY, wait never mind. I couldn't get to the internet there. But I was still able to ping quite nicely. Also some other services seemed to work. So I decided that something was screwing up browsing.

At the same time his antivirus wasn't working, usually I would blame a virus for that but it was Norton 360, and sadly I have had many issues with that software in its different versions. So I load up Microsoft's Security Essentials and it's able to pull up its definitions and after a quick scan nothing scary. So most likely Norton not working is just coincidental not a problem linked to this issue at hand.

After searching around Google with various terms. Some people mentioned different Suggestions. Resetting Winsock, System Restore, running some other tests, and uninstalling recent updates. So after doing all the ones up to the updates. I did notice he had gotten 5 updates the day before he called me. One of them being Internet Explorer 8, which I ignored at first since it was on many of our work computers and hadn't caused a problem. I removed a security update and another Vista update. Rebooted, still no go. So uninstalled IE8, rebooted.......

It worked. So during the update process for it, it must have borked up Vista. Anyways, I hope that helps some others that run into this problem. Now off to bed.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Keep it Clean.