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Can't load certain web pages.

Started by magusbuckley , Feb 10 2008 11:55 AM

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#1
magusbuckley
Posted 10 February 2008 - 11:55 AM

magusbuckley

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Hello:

About a week ago, my wife complained that she couldn't check her hotmail from our house. I brushed it off and told her that their site must be down. Earlier in the day, after all, I was able to check my own hotmail account. That night, she was able to access her account from work. On the following day, she still couldn't access her hotmail account from home.

I started realizing there was a problem myself a day or two later when I couldn't get about 75% of the videos I tried to watch at YouTube to play.

The real kicker was last night when my little boy pointed to leaves on a tree and told me those were spinach leaves. I brought him inside and decided to pull up pictures of spinach at Google. To my dismay, I was able to look up spinach, but I am unable to access the page for images. The more I played with it, the more I realized I couldn't get to any images page for any search term at Google or many of the sites I frequently visit.

I get a timeout message, but only after about three minutes or so. It's crazy.

I deleted all of my Internet history, cache, temp files, etc. and flushed my DNS. I don't have any add-ons for IE7 so there was nothing to disable other than the usual java stuff, etc.

Do any of you have any idea why my browser won't let me access certain pages?

I haven't tried another browser yet so that will be another option for me tonight.

Any and all information will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Magus
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#2
mattagc
Posted 11 February 2008 - 09:22 PM

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I actually think I have pretty much the same problem...here's the post I accidentally posted in the Vista forums...

Hello,

Now, by all means, this isn't really a problem for me as I rarely use IE, but I've noticed something interesting in playing with it. It seems to randomly not completely open links. If I click on a link on a webpage, a new window will pop up, but the page will sit there blank and never load. (The progress bar in the status bar will fill incredibly slowly before timing out completely.) The interesting thing comes in if I go to the same page with another browser (Firefox, Safari, or even Opera) on the same machine. The page will open up fine, and in some cases, it seems to "trigger" the IE page into finally loading up.

I was really just wondering if anyone has seen of this, or knows of a solution to this. The only reason I ask is the discovery the other day the trying the link in another browser will "kick-start" the loading of the page. Is something perhaps going iffy with my network or it's settings?

By the way, this is a clean install - less that a week old, now that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but Kaspersky finds nothing, as does Windows Defender.

Thanks for any insight,

Matt


Did trying another browser have an effect?

Matt
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#3
magusbuckley
Posted 11 February 2008 - 09:44 PM

magusbuckley

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mattagc:

Thanks for the reply.

I haven't tried another browser yet. When I got home today, I did more testing and once again confirmed that I am unable to access certain web pages.

I couldn't find a way to uninstall IE7 so Googled it. As it turns out, IE7 is built in and can not be removed. In searching for that information, though, I did manage to run across a post where a guy mentions resetting the browser. You do this from the Internet settings in the Control Panel. Inside, you click the "Advanced" tab and then click the "Reset" button. I tried that and hopped back online to try viewing a youtube video I just couldn't get to load. I was amazed. The video loaded right up. It had worked....or had it? I navigated to Google, did a search, and then clicked "Images" in the upper left hand corner. Unfortunately, I'm still not getting images from Google. Back at youtube, I found that most of the videos still won't play. In fact, it's worse now. I'd say about 90 percent of the ones I clicked wouldn't play. I could spew off a long list of sites I've tried that don't work, but the list of working sites would be shorter at this point.

Mozilla...here I come!

Thanks,

Magus
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#4
mattagc
Posted 12 February 2008 - 02:16 PM

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*nods* Yeah. I had tried the reset options as well to no avail. I even went in and disabled the phishing filters and turned off the protected zones temporarily, but even that didn't bring results.

Since it's not my main browser anyhow, its not too big of a concern for me, but I was just wondering if anyone else has the same problem or a solution.

Anyhow, I'll keep you updated if I find anything else out.

Matt
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#5
magusbuckley
Posted 14 February 2008 - 11:17 PM

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mattag:

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that my problem is solved. The bad news is that I can't confirm what solved the problem.

My best guess is "downloaded, but uninstalled Vista updates." You see, this computer I have is relatively new (less than one month). It had downloaded updates that were ready to install, but I kept putting that off because I was so busy doing other things - Installing my programs, moving my data, making backups, etc.

I finally allowed the updates to install and then rebooted. When the system came back up, the problem was gone. I can now go to any web page I want.

Again, I can't confirm this, but if you do have this problem again, make sure your windows updates aren't just downloaded, but installed too!

Thanks for your help,

Magus
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#6
mattagc
Posted 16 February 2008 - 10:52 AM

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Interesting, I'll have to check on that, but the only one available for me right now is the Medcia Center and a ATI update. I'll run it anyhow though and see what happens. I'll let you know.

Matt
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#7
magusbuckley
Posted 23 March 2008 - 07:57 PM

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About a month and a half ago, I made the inital post for this topic. In the end, we left not knowing what caused the problem or what fixed it. From looking at the replies, I noted that many of you were having this same problem, or have had this problem in the past.

I started having this issue again three days ago. Again, I was unable to repair the system. Mine is still under warranty so I called them up (Alienware). The agent remoted into my PC and checked my browser settings. After being on the phone for nearly a half hour, I mentioned that the only thing I had not tried was rebooting the router and modem. He and I both agreed that this didn't make much sense for a fix because if the router or modem were broken, I wouldn't be able to get to ANY web pages. Still, we had to give it a shot. If you can believe this, it worked! I can't explain it, but it worked. He and I learned something today and I felt obligated to pass the word along.

For more information about the problems I was having, please see the initial post.

Thanks,

Magus
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#8
Aaroneas
Posted 24 May 2008 - 10:43 PM

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Hey guys .... thank you so much for this post i couludnt get youtube to pull up at all and all i did was simply restarted my modem and router and it works again! thank you so much guys!
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