Cannot open any website but connected to internet

Question

I cannot open any website on my Windows Vista machine though I am connected to internet ( can make calls using Skype). I am connected to a wireless network. Everytime, when I open a URL, it shows error that name could not be resolved. I tried to ping the dns server and it successfully pinged.
Also, when I reboot the machine in Ubuntu, I am able to open websites.

Answer 1

This is a DNS issue.

Go to your network settings and see what DNS is currently used. It is most likely set to obtain one from your router. Try putting in 4.2.2.1 which is a free public verizon DNS and see if that makes a difference.

As a test, try putting in http://72.14.204.147 into your browser. That should get you to google.com.

Answer 2

This must have something to do with your browser.
Have you tried different browsers (chrome, firefox, etc)?

Alternatively, check with the following steps to see if you can connect with a web-server from your windows machine.

1. Open the cmd.exe (Run, cmd.exe)
2. Execute telnet www.google.com 80
   This should appear to 'stall' with no output.
   If it stalls with 'Connecting to www.google.com' -- you have a DNS problem.
3. Now, press a character (say, 'a'),
   It should dump some HTML stuff and exit.
   (this will be 400 Bad Request error from the server -- confirming you were talking with it).

This means your Windows machine is able to connect to the Google server.

Then pick an unused IP address
(234.42.2.4 does not seem to respond to ping at this time).

Execute telnet 234.42.2.4 80
This should immediately return with a Could not open connection.
This would be what you will see with www.google.com too if you had HTTP connectivity problems.

Answer 3

Agreeing with JNK, you could also type "nslookup" at a Windows command prompt. At the nslookup prompt, type "google.com" (or any other domain name) and see if you can resolve.

Answer 4

Try flushing your DNS, open up a command prompty and type

ipconfig /flushdns

then hit enter.