Spotty Internet Service

[Jack Bruss]

I just built a computer for my brother, and he is having a problem with his
dial up ISP service. Many sites will just not come up, including many
common ones like MSN and others, even
Google at times. He just gets a message saying the server cannot be found.
It happens erratically, but often, and it's hard to know if the ISP is at
fault or not. He was on a cell phone with them for a long time trying to
fix the problem, and they said they could ping him ok, and they finally
told him that his anti virus software must be preventing him from getting
some stuff. Does this make sense?

I'm going over this weekend to try and help him out, but I'm not sure what
to try. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jack

 

[Rob Schneider]

Something is interferring with his DNS (Domain Naming System) which
translates site names, e.g. www.yahoo.com, into IP addresses, eg.
123.45.678.

The likely culprit is a computer virus. I recall one (or more) of them
do this. Ensure using up-to-date anti-virus software and check. Or it
could be the ISP's DNS (what your brother's computer is connected to)
is not working properly (not likely).

Anti-virus software, to my knowledge, does not interfere with internet
access.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Malke]

I just built a computer for my brother, and he is having a problem
with his
dial up ISP service. Many sites will just not come up, including many
common ones like MSN and others, even
Google at times. He just gets a message saying the server cannot be
found. It happens erratically, but often, and it's hard to know if the
ISP is at
fault or not. He was on a cell phone with them for a long time trying
to fix the problem, and they said they could ping him ok, and they
finally told him that his anti virus software must be preventing him
from getting
some stuff. Does this make sense?

Hi, Jack. First, change out the modem's phone line cable. Try connecting
the modem to a different phone jack. If that all seems OK, then try
with a different modem. You didn't say which modem you installed; maybe
it's one of the very cheapest ones and it just isn't very good. Another
factor may be the quality of your brother's phone line. Unless you have
those skills, I believe the phone company has to test that, but if his
voice quality isn't very good, it will be hard to reliably transfer
data. You didn't say which ISP he's using, either. If it is something
like a local service or a very inexpensive service, then the problem
could be on their end. I had a client using PeoplePC ($11/mo. which is
very cheap here) and the connection was awful. They switched to
Earthlink and saw an immediate jump in quality.

Those are just some ideas for you. Of course, when you troubleshoot, you
always want to try just one thing at a time and then test it, only
moving on to the next thing after you've determined your change didn't
work the magic. If you need more help, repost and include the
information I asked for above.

Good luck,

Malke