A friend of mine is having strange network problems. He's got a Dell Inspiron 8500, purchased in 2003. It has a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller in it, running the most current drivers available on Dell's support site.
When you open a command prompt and try to ping any website, the requests time out. I tried to run a traceroute to see where it was getting held up, but after attempting to run the traceroute for a few minutes, the computer freezes and must be hard booted. And ipconfig command shows that the computer is obtaining an IP address correctly. All this is from the University of Hawaii's resident network -- we're living in a dorm.
Now here's the good part: the internet connection works fine.
If you open up IE, you can browse the net with no problems at all. Connection is fast and responsive. However, he is a World of Warcraft player. When he is in game there is no trouble, but connecting to a server can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (due to an exceptionally long connection time and frequent failed connection attempts).
Anyone know what might be causing this? I wish I could get the computer to give me a traceroute, but given the way it is acting, I am tempted to leave well enough alone. It works for him, if sluggishly in that one respect, so I'd hate to make it worse. But the fact that it seems to work fine in a browser but can't ping anything at all in a command prompt confuses me. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-GS
When you open a command prompt and try to ping any website, the requests time out. I tried to run a traceroute to see where it was getting held up, but after attempting to run the traceroute for a few minutes, the computer freezes and must be hard booted. And ipconfig command shows that the computer is obtaining an IP address correctly. All this is from the University of Hawaii's resident network -- we're living in a dorm.
Now here's the good part: the internet connection works fine.
If you open up IE, you can browse the net with no problems at all. Connection is fast and responsive. However, he is a World of Warcraft player. When he is in game there is no trouble, but connecting to a server can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (due to an exceptionally long connection time and frequent failed connection attempts).
Anyone know what might be causing this? I wish I could get the computer to give me a traceroute, but given the way it is acting, I am tempted to leave well enough alone. It works for him, if sluggishly in that one respect, so I'd hate to make it worse. But the fact that it seems to work fine in a browser but can't ping anything at all in a command prompt confuses me. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-GS
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