internet explorer address bar

Hello!
when entering an address in the explorer address bar eg: www.hotmail.com the browser will not find the website! however if you tap in the IP address of the site it finds it, bizaar!!! does anyone know what could be causing this please??
Thanks,
James.

 

Check your hosts file to see if there's an entry for it in there. Where it's located depends on which OS you're using. If 9X, it'll be located in the windows folder. If XP, you'll find it in windows\system32\drivers\etc. This file is named just hosts with no extension. Open it in notepad and if you find an entry in there for hotmail.com delete it and then see if it'll work for you.

 

If it is a single site, then Zander has given you the most likely.

If it is all sites, then for whatever reason you are not finding a DNS server since their function in life is to translate www.someplace.com into the numeric address of that site. Computers need the numbers while we meat people like words.

If it is just some sites then three possibilities.
- you have a bunch of bogus entries in your hosts file. Some trojans try to protect themselves by writing entries that will block you getting to AV cleanup sites. The fix is to delete all the bad entries. You would probably see things like
127.0.0.1 www.someplace.com
and would need to delete that entire line.
- 2K, XP, 2K3 will create a local cache of the name-address matches to speed up your connecting to them. If this cache has wrong information, you can't get to the site except via it's IP address. Easy enough to cure by simply going to a start->run line, keying in

Code:

ipconfig /flushdns

and OK. That will clear your cache and not hurt anything since the next time you go to www.someplace.com, the info will be retained in cache.
- your ISP could have some bad cached DNS entries on their server. In that case, you can't fix it but a call to tech support for the ISP and they can.

 

Have you gone to tools/ internet options/ advanced
Check the box " Use inline autocomplete "

Go to tools / internet options/ content / autocomplete / settings

Put a check in the " use autocomplete for web addresses "