Strange connection problems - please help

[luco]

HELP!

I don't know what's going on with my high-speed connection. It drops at frequent intervals and comes back for about 5 minutes then drops again. Interesting part is that when it goes off, I can still ping my ISP gateway, I can still watch TV (I have TV tuner) but I cannot open any webpage.

My ISP says my signal is perfect for the past few days and that it's probably something with my computer. Well, that's not the case! I am running latest virus definitions with my MacAfee and I have scanned my system with Spybot S&D and AdAware. No problems.

Also, when I connect my laptop to my connection same thing happens. Even my friend brought his laptop over and he had the same problem. I have reset the modem, renewed IP, I have even turned off my firewall etc. to no avail.

My ISP's tech support sucks! I'm gonna ask for them to send a tech over to check this out. In the mean time, can someone help me diagnose this?

Thank you very much.

 

[mechBgon]

Try pinging the ISP's DNS servers next time. Do you have a router and/or a software firewall? What OS and service pack?

 

[luco]

thanks for the quick reply.

I cannot ping the DNS servers, but I can still ping my ISP's default gateway.
Here are my results trying to ping Anandtech.

Pinging www.anandtech.com [66.117.33.58] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 66.117.33.58:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

It's same whether I'm able to browse or not. I have tried to enter that IP address instead
of www.anandtech.com in IE and nothing comes up. Interestingly enough, my firewall indicates there's traffic happening and I can see that my bittorrent client is happily continuing its downloads. Explain that one to me!?
At first, I thought that there's something blocking port 80 traffic for http. However, I
disabled my firewall and I know I don't have any spyware.

I'm using WinXP SP1 and ZoneAlarm firewall. I had this going through a router with hardware firewall, but it's happening even without router and with ZoneAlarm turned off.

Any other ideas?

 

[montag451]

Don't try pinging ANANDTECH,
Ping www.bbc.co.uk
see if that works

 

[mechBgon]

Why aren't you using Service Pack 2? Do you just like having a vulnerable OS or something?

I have even turned off my firewall

I see you are not the brightest crayon in the box. Recommendation: don't pull that stunt again. Get yourself a broadband router to put a layer of defense between your modem and your computer(s).

If your system can't ping the ISP's DNS servers, then it stands to reason that your web browser won't work, because the DNS servers are what translates an English-language URL into an IP address so your system can browse.

 

[imported_java]

They guy says he had a hardware router already. As to why the ping for anandtech didn't work, it has a firewall that will block ping attempts, to stop hackers. get sp2 and don't turn ur firewall off, or u'll be best fiends with all the worms and virusi. If u can still make downloads then ur ISP was correct and ur internet service has been fine for the five days but it may be the dns servers. go to www.dnsstuff.com and get the IP of a website using DNS lookup (which one doesn't really matter, I like google). Next tmie your service drops try using the IP address in your address bar. So it would be www.google.com - doesn't work. 216.239.34.10 - works (that is google's ip by the way). Then if that is the case its a dns problem and u can tell ur isp that. If that is the case a whole bunch of other ppl will be haivng the same problem and they'll probably be getting a few calls.

 

[luco]

I appreciate all the suggestions guys, but you are not reading my replies fully.

mechBgon
I have only turned my firewall off for a second to try to connect to Google. No luck, so it's back on. I'm not that stupid. I get many attack attempts as I check my logs. As I said in my posts above, I have a router w/firewall.
So my defenses are: hardware firewall, ZoneAlarm, McAfee Antivirus, Spybot S&D, and AdAware and my system is clean.
Also, I understand how DNS works. In my second reply above I said that I have tried using the actual IP address in my browser to connect to Anandtech with no luck.

montag451
Thanks for the tip on www.bbc.co.uk. Interesting part is that when I try to ping them when I cannot browse I do get DNS resolution as it returns the IP and tries to ping it with no reply. Sometimes when I'm down, I try to ping my ISP's website and I get reply that it cannot resolve host name. This tells me DNS server is down. Then another time it resolves the IP address, but cannot ping it.

The thing is, how can one explain all of this happening on my work laptop and my friend's laptop connected directly to the modem? So, I know it's not my PC or my router, or TCP/IP or my NIC. This tells me it's my ISP's issue, but they say all is OK and my modem never blinks (indicating that it lost connection) so all looks OK.

I'm VERY puzzled.