Unable to access websites

Question

Recently I have had some problems accessing websites. When I try to access them it says:

This webpage is not available.

I tried accessing the site through Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. I also tried using a web proxy but I still have the same problem. This problem is only on my desktop PC; all the websites work fine on my laptop.

Currently, I cant access yahoo.com, download.com, bing.com, proxy.org, daniweb.com aol.com, and many forums.

I checked with the host file, but nothing is blocked in that. Can someone please suggest what is wrong?

Thanks

Answer 1

First of all, are all sites unavailable, or just some?
If only a few sites are unavailable, the problem may be at their end.

If all web-sites have a problem, then you have to consider that your browser needs to look up the IP address of the site first, looking up the name from a DNS server. If there's no DNS server available, the lookup will fail.

Start with the basics. Start a Command Prompt (Start > Run > cmd.exe) and try to ping one of the problem web-sites:

ping www.sitename.com

If the ping command reports something like:

Ping request could not find host ...

...then you may fairly low-level network problem.

If however the ping command reports replies from some remote system, that proves your network connection and DNS look-ups are working OK.

So the next thing to check would be network/proxy settings. These can be (mis-)configured in your browser, but since you say all browsers are affected in the same way, it could be a Windows setting.

Answer 2

Check firewalls/virusscan/routers/connectioncable/dns settings etc.. maybe some newly installed software blocking the connection?