Hi folks, this is my first attempt to post to this forum, and I'm afraid it is a long one.
I had a similar problem to Doug1234 recently so my experience may be of some help. I have two laptops - one XP, one Vista. I use a 'dongle' to connect to the internet (I have a mobile broadband account with 3UK) which can be plugged into either machine. Between August 24th and September 3rd, I was unable to display any web pages on my Vista laptop even though I was connected to the internet. I use both Mozilla and Internet Explorer, but neither browser worked. The message displayed was 'unable to display page...' and the usual list of reasons proffered (server may be busy or having problems, you are not connected to the internet... etc.) Swopping the 'dongle' to the XP laptop proved that the dongle was working, I was connecting to the internet OK and that the web pages were accessible. I accepted the IE offer to diagnose the fault and that confirmed there was no fault with the internet connection on the Vista machine. Spontaneously (although at the time, I thought it was because I switched the network settings on the 'dongle' from "automatically select" to "manually select" the network connection) on Sept 4th, full internet access was regained. The problem reccured, however, on Sept 19th and nothing I did could fix it. I telephoned the 3UK support service (on Sept 21st)but they couldn't pinpoint the problem. Eventually, they surmised it must be an issue between my hardware (Packard Bell EasyNote) and the Vista operating system and suggested I contact my technical support for the laptop. While trying to locate a route through to the PB support teams, I noticed that, according to the PBUpdator icon on my desktop, there appeared to be some updates outstanding. There were 11 items in the list of updates, which I proceeded to download and install. [Incidentally, I had already discovered that it was possible to download software via the internet connection even though the browser couldn't display any web pages, and had already completed all Windows and antivirus updates available for the laptop.] The penultimate update listed by PBUpdator was for 'Google Desktop' and this insisted on rebooting the machine (I had been selecting 'restart later' whenever prompted so far) which, of course severed the network connection on me. Anyway, once that was restored, I tried to display a web page - but unsuccessfully. Then I completed the 'Google Desktop' installation, tried the browser again and IT WORKED!!! I have had no problems using the browsers since.
I do not know if anything I did affected the problem, or whether the problem may yet re-occur. If anyone else has any words of wisdom, I'd be grateful to hear them.
