Broadband and internet

[dalek501]

Hi,

We seem to be having a problem with our Broadband that manifests itself in all three browsers I have tried. 4-5 times an hour we will get 1-2 minutes where we cannot load any websites. Like I say, this happens with IE, Firefox and Chrome. Firefox seems to come off worse as it appears to hang (with the icon spinning) for 1-2 minutes. Chrome seems to cope best and fairly quickly brings up an error page suggesting a DNS error.

All the lights on the router (BT business hub) stay on, it doesnt seem to affect email or Windows messenger, and seems to be the same on both our computers here.

Any help would be appreciated thanks!  

[sej7278]

Try using the OpenDNS servers instead of the BT ones:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

[dalek501]

Thanks for the advice!

On the short testing time Ive had with it, certainly Chrome has shown no signs of stalling at all. But Firefox does still intermittantly do it. For the time being I'm going to assume that there is a problem with firefox as going to the support site for that seems to indicate that many people are having a problem with it, particularly using multiple tabs as I do.

I'll keep trying for the rest of the day to see how things go...

[sej7278]

have you tried disabling ipv6 DNS lookups in firefox?

type about:config in the url bar and set network.dns.disableIPv6 to true or 1

[dalek501]

I've just given that a try yes. And for 30 minutes everything looked great. I thought it was solved. But then it happened again. 

Two tabs open... I go to a bookmark in the second tab, the address doesnt appear in the address bar but the icon starts to spin. I go back to the first tab and refresh to see if I can boot it (!) into working, and that does the same. The icon just starts to spin. After a couple of minutes the pages pop up.

Chrome still seems to be fine after changing to the different DNS servers.

[spank]

Hi there,

It sounds like your connection is dropping out.

Open a command prompt and type ipconfig, take down the default gateway address.

To test this open 3 seperate command prompt windows and put one of these commands in each.

ping www.google.com -t

ping 219.239.59.104 -t

ping 'the default gateway address' -t

This will start extended pings to check local connectivity, internet connectivity and DNS connectivity.

Leave that running then when the problem occurs report here which test times out.

Thanks.

[dalek501]

Hi,

Thanks for the help.

The "ping 219.239.59.104 -t" timed out immediately I started trying and that was before I brought up firefox. The problem did occur pretty well instantly once I had opened 2-3 tabs in FF.

Both other pings continued fine during this time.

Cheers...

[spank]

Ach silly me, i gave you the wrong address its 216.239.59.99

Sorry!

Try the tests again, just leave them running until your browsing stops then check to see whats timed out.

Thanks

[dalek501]

OK tried with this new number.

I loaded up FF with 4 tabs, and hit refresh on the 4 different pages, and they immediately all stalled for around 3 minutes before all the pages refreshed.

All the pings were fine during this time.

[spank]

I have seen this on more than a a few occassions.  It does seem like your connection is fine though so it's something on your pc or network. 

When you search for a web page the browser does do a few things first, it scans the hosts file for alternate Ip addresses, if there are is web accelleration software on your pc or has ever been on your pc then the hosts file could be highly populated slowing this process down. 

Do a search in c:\window\system for hosts, make sure hidden files and folders are searchable, right click the file and open in notepad.  All that should be in there is 127.0.0.1 localhost, there may be some text above this dont worry about that.

If you do have accelleration software I would suggest removing it. 

There could also be something on the network causing a problem, I have seen some hardware causing issues like this so I would isolate 1 pc and see if the problem still exists. 

Also check to see how many network connections you have and how many are connected, you may be innadvertantly connected to another network (maybe wirelessly) and the browser is using that first then scanning the other connections.  If your not sure report back here what network connections you have listed and what the status of each one is.

Might be worth booting into safe mode as well to see if the problem still exisits, this will rule out any rogue software or processes causing the problem.

I have seen malware do this, it reports your web activity before allowing you to view the page causing stalls. 

Thanks