Spotty Internet Service

I just built a computer for my brother, and he is having a problem with his
dial up ISP service. Many sites will just not come up, including many
common ones like MSN and others, even
Google at times. He just gets a message saying the server cannot be found.
It happens erratically, but often, and it's hard to know if the ISP is at
fault or not. He was on a cell phone with them for a long time trying to
fix the problem, and they said they could ping him ok, and they finally
told him that his anti virus software must be preventing him from getting
some stuff. Does this make sense?

I'm going over this weekend to try and help him out, but I'm not sure what
to try. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jack

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:58:24 -0600, "Jack Bruss" <jbruss.DeleteThis@wi.rr.com> wrote:

 >I just built a computer for my brother, and he is having a problem with his
 >dial up ISP service. Many sites will just not come up, including many
 >common ones like MSN and others, even
 >Google at times. He just gets a message saying the server cannot be found.
 >It happens erratically, but often, and it's hard to know if the ISP is at
 >fault or not. He was on a cell phone with them for a long time trying to
 >fix the problem, and they said they could ping him ok, and they finally
 >told him that his anti virus software must be preventing him from getting
 >some stuff. Does this make sense?
 >
 >I'm going over this weekend to try and help him out, but I'm not sure what
 >to try. Any ideas?
 >
 >Thanks,
 >
 >Jack
 >
Could be firewall or filtering software, not likely to be antivirus. More
likely a problem with their DNS servers. The problem is name resolution
which relies on their DNS servers to cross reference a name to an IP
address. Firewalls and filtering programs intercept these DNS queries, so
could be the problem, but not likely for MSN.

JT<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->