I'm having a problem that has me stumped:
I built a custom Windows XP Home system for a home user a few weeks ago.
She has dial-up Internet using an external modem (holdover from her old
system) connected to the 9-pin COM1 ****t. Her ISP is AT&T.
Ever since I set the system up, she's had intermittent connectivity
problems. She can always dial in to her ISP okay, but once online, she
has periods -- sometimes days on end -- where no web pages will come up,
either on IE or Firefox. If I do an NSLOOKUP on random web pages during
these "outages", I get errors saying the DNS server timed out, but when
I ping the DNS servers directly, they seem to be okay.
Her ISP has been AT&T, but she tried switching to PeoplePC -- Same
problem: Sometimes the web pages are reachable, sometimes not. But she
can always dial-in and get a connection, so that rules out the modem --
Or does it?
I suggested testing her modem and phone line, but she insists that's not
the problem because she gets great reception when she calls someone on
the phone, and besides she can always dial-in to her ISP, as I said.
It's just that once dialed in, no Internet resources are reachable, as
if the DNS servers were all on vacation.
If it was just the ISP, I might think they were having "issues" they
won't admit to (she's spent hours on the phone with their unhelpful tech
sup****t). But PeoplePC shows the exact same symptoms. And I don't know
what settings in Windows might be at fault, since the problem is
intermittent. BTW, she also tried disabling and even uninstalling her
virus/firewall suite (McAfee), but it made no difference.
I'm really stuck -- I don't know how to proceed. Any suggestions?
Dave
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