Cannot Access Page

I am using WIN XP, Earthlink & Netscape 7.0 to surf the Internet. Often, I am unable to access an item I want to look at and instead get an error message, "Unable to access this page ". Sometimes, however, I can access the page I want if I click the "Reload Current Page" arrow..........but not always! How can I correct this problem?

 

Next time it happens, try the following and if you would, post back with the results:

start~run~ipconfig /flushdns

 

NEWT:

I tried your suggestion. When entering "ipconfig' ", a window pops up very briefly and then disappears. The window frame has the title, "C:\Windows\System 32\ipconfig.exe but the normal text area is completely black. If I enter "ipconfig/flushdns" in the Run box, I get an error msg. saying Windows cannot find the file.

 

There is a space between ipconfig and /flushdns

When it runs properly you should see a "DOS" window for maybe a second or two and then it goes away.

 

NEWT,

Yes, I tried the run text with the space you described and got the window I told you about entitled, "C:\Windows\System32\ipconfig.exe" with the text area
solid black. The window flashed for about 1 sec. and disappeared! No reference to DOS.

 

That is the normal behavior.

When I mentioned "DOS" I meant you would get the ugly black screen with white lettering (went by too fast to see) that we had back in the bad old days of MS-DOS.

To de-mystify this whole thing, XP is set to do a number of things to speed up your network & internet work. One of those things is to store the DNS entries when you first visit a site (DNS matches the site name to it's address) so your PC won't have to look for the information on another DNS server. The information is dumped/purged periodically or when you log off.

If you found a site (it loaded) then all is well and you can get back to it slightly faster the next time. However, if you had trouble reaching a site, that is also stored and on your next try you may well not get there again even if whatever problem caused the first failure is cleared up. Also if the site information was changed for real, internet DNS servers would update but your cached information wouldn't and would be out of date so worthless and could cause a connection failure.

When you clear the DNS cache (via ipconfig /flushdns) it simply wipes out the session information so next time you go to a site, it has to use an internet DNS server to find the site. Takes slightly longer (fractional part of a second usually) but gives you a clean start.

 

NEWT,

Thanks for the in-depth tutorial!