I'm trying to remotely assist a friend with a problem the likes of which I've never seen before.
He has a new HP Win7 laptop works perfectly when using a WIRED connection to his home network (Comcast supplied cable router). Other machines, including old WinXP laptop, MacBook, and new Dell Win7 Laptop, also work perfectly when using either a WIRED or a WIRELESS connection.
However, the new HP Win7 machine will only "sorta" work when using a WIRELESS connection. The "sorta" is the part that is truly bizarre to me. This sounds crazy, but it apparently can access sites in the local geographic region. My friend is in the Atlanta suburbs and can, for example, access sites from local universities like www.gatech.edu, www.emory.edu, as well as a site from a local company known to have its servers hosted in downtown Atlanta. However, my friend CANNOT access large national sites such as www.cnn.com, www.msnbc.com, www.nytimes.com, etc. When I say "cannot access", I mean that he gets "Web site found, waiting for reply" in the status bar for a long time, then eventually an error about site cannot be accessed.
To add to the mystery, he CAN access www.google.com with no problem, can even get search results no problem.
I've done lots of research and I've had him try various suggestions but none have worked. Pretty much any explanation I have found seems to make no sense regarding the "can access some sites but not others" problem. For example, a commonly cited issue is MAC address filtering. That would make sense if he couldn't get to ANY sites, but doesn't explain why he can get to some but not others.
I am at my wit's end! Any suggestions? Unfortunately, troubleshooting is greatly complicated by the fact that my friend is not computer savvy, and I don't have physical access to the machine or network in question. I have to do everything remotely by telephone instruction, which is tedious to say the least.