Stange delay on laptop bringing up webpages

mewso

I'm baffled by this one. Maybe someone here might have some ideas. My Dad's laptop takes about 17 seconds to bring up any website despite the fact that the connection seems fine. I brought my laptop home and connected to his wifi and had no problems. I tried typing the ip of google into his browser and it came up straight away. Now I assumed this meant there was some kind of DNS error/delay but I'm not knowledgable enough in this area to figure out where this problem is occurring if my laptop has no problem whatsoever. Could there be some setting somewhere on his machine that causes this?
Hes been uninstalling whatever he can think of - replaced McAfee with AVG, switched to Windows Firewall etc. I'm at a loss.

Cabaal

Moving from Broadband to computers and tech

Sherifu

It does seem to be a dns issue

You can try
ipconfig /flushdns

from the command line

qwertz

properly read the op and agree with the others, check your DNS settings.

keith_d99

Yeah I would say DNS server

You can specify Eircom's 2 DNS servers in your TCP/IP settings. Not sure of the exact IP addresses but you can find them on the router page.

Alternatively - you can use setting from www.opendns.com

mewso

Yeah thanks I thought the same myself but there are DNS servers specified in the settings presumably created when the thing was setup with the eircom disk. These are specified on the wifi router. Could something in the network settings on the laptop be clashing with this I wonder?

yoyo

musician wrote: »

Yeah thanks I thought the same myself but there are DNS servers specified in the settings presumably created when the thing was setup with the eircom disk. These are specified on the wifi router. Could something in the network settings on the laptop be clashing with this I wonder?

What Anti Virus, firewall softwares is he using?

Nick

mewso

yoyo wrote: »

What Anti Virus, firewall softwares is he using?

Nick

He has switched/uninstalled from McAfee(might be Norton not sure) to AVG and Windows Firewall and it hasn't helped.

yoyo

musician wrote: »

He has switched/uninstalled from McAfee(might be Norton not sure) to AVG and Windows Firewall and it hasn't helped.

Is DHCP enabled on the pc? Also are the DNS servers hardcoded on the pc rather than "Set these changes automaticly", might be worthwhile changing DNS servers to OpenDNS as others suggested, in case the DNS servers are causing the issiue, instructions are on www.opendns.com

Nick

mewso

O.k. I'll get him to try opendns. His network settings on the wireless connection - tcp/ip are set to pick up the dns automatically. Thanks for the suggestions.

ntlbell

musician wrote: »

O.k. I'll get him to try opendns. His network settings on the wireless connection - tcp/ip are set to pick up the dns automatically. Thanks for the suggestions.

Have you tried resetting the tcp/ip stack?

if you to a site by ip is it the same?

Use those dev skills of yours to get nslookup to do a few hundred looks against the dns servers to see are they failing every few lookups

try doing a few pathpings/trace routes to a few sites and see is there much packet loss

is it the same regardless of browser?

does it matter if the site is inside/outside ireland?

are ftp or any other proto's affected?

mewso

Thanks Brian I'll check those out. I'm actually off for a week skiing this morning so he'll have to wait until I get back. Hes been living (frustration building) with it for a while so a week won't make much difference.