Web browsers timing out

[mosherben]

Hi,
I'm using a USB wireless card to surf the net on my laptop,which has a full 54MBs connection to the router. However, my web browsers (firefox and internet explorer) would randomly stop working.. giving time outs whilst MSN would work fine. Repairing the connection would not help, but I'm sure it's a software problem as MSN works fine when I repair. Does anyone have any ideas?

PS: Running Win XP Pro SP2

[d3fiant]

wot is the signal strength like? MSN polls and may get away with polling on an intermittent weak connection whereas surfing is much more demanding of the connection (gfx etc) so it may be a poor connection. Could also be a driver issue, have they been updated to the latest

Edit: sorry just noticed u said full signal above, try drivers, I had intermittent drops with an MSI PCI wireless card, updated driver cured the problem

[GrahamGarside]

Does the router have a http configuration page? If so are there any issues accessing this or even pinging the router?

If there aren't then it's unlikely an issue of the wireless connection to the router.

[mosherben]

Nope, I can ping the router and external websites absolotely fine- I've tried it on clara.net and yahoo.co.uk. It just seems to be the browsers and everything was working fine until the weekend havn't touched the connection settings or anything. I can login to Skype fine also- it seems to timeoout after 5 mins of logging into windows, althrough it has worked for longer.

I've had the USB wireless card since December, before then I was using the internal wireless card which came with the laptop before that started being faulty. I've since removed the internal wireless card.

One thing to note, when i restart the laptop it fixes itself but then it would just cut out again. Really annoying, does anyone have any ideas?

EDIT: just noticed d3fiants post, I'll try updating the drivers when I get home

[GrahamGarside]

Do you have the option of using a wired connection?

[mosherben]

Yup, but I'd prefer using wireless since it would enable me to use the laptop anywhere. I'd have a go at the wired connection to test if it's just the wireless card when I get back.

[mosherben]

I got suggusted to re-install my wireless card... IE seems to be working fine however firefox isn't. Currently got Direct connection to the internet under connection settings as I couldn't think anything else it could be.

Any ideas?

[GrahamGarside]

Yup, but I'd prefer using wireless since it would enable me to use the laptop anywhere. I'd have a go at the wired connection to test if it's just the wireless card when I get back.

No I don't mean as a permanent solution, just to ascertain that the problem is isolated to the wireless link or not. If browsing works fine over a wire then you know for sure it's an issue with either the wireless pc adapter or the routers wireless setup.

[mosherben]

No I don't mean as a permanent solution, just to ascertain that the problem is isolated to the wireless link or not. If browsing works fine over a wire then you know for sure it's an issue with either the wireless pc adapter or the routers wireless setup.

Not really an option- I'm sharing with 3 other people and all the ethernet ports are taken (we have a media center, and a xbox)

Thanks for the throught through

[GrahamGarside]

You can't temporarily plug a line into your laptop just for testing?

[mosherben]

I did.. I just got really distracted last night.

Ok this is wierd- internet explorer was working fine for 3 hours when I was using my wired connection and now that's cr*pping out,

I think something's wrong with my laptop, it frooze twice in a go when I just logged into MSN. I ended uo removing and putting the battery in. Could this be related?

Cheers for your help Graham

[GrahamGarside]

Sounds like a problem with Windows TCP/IP stack if it's affecting both your wired and wireless networking. I take it no one else in your household using the wired connections has any grief?

Do you have a firewall program other than the normal SP2 firewall running?

Do you share anything over the network between the differant computers? If so is this affected at all?

[mosherben]

Nope, everyone else's is working fine- for both wired and wireless.

I have Zone Alarm and Netlimiter Pro 2.. house rules when I'm watching footy via p2p software.

Not that I'm aware of- if this means sharing folders on my laptop but we do have a few shared folders on the media center.

What do I need to do to sort my TCP/IP stack?

EDIT: when I was talking on MSN last night to my girlfriend, some of each other's msg's wern't getting recieved. No idea why there was packetloss.

[mosherben]

I'm still having this issue- I downloaded a TCP/IP reset program last night and reset the stack. It didn't work

I also tried resetting my LSP's as it had an option in that program to do so, that didn't work either.

Firefox is working now, instead of not working even when internet explorer is fine. Seems I have made some progress..

I can't find any drivers for my wireless card.. it's a Sitecom Turbo G card if I remember correct. When I bought the card, I just used the drivers off the CD.

PS: Also ran spyware checker, virus checker and Hijack this in case it was something else making this problem

[GrahamGarside]

The shared folders on the media centre, is there any problem accessing/altering these from your system?

From what I can gather the problem seems isolated to your laptop, over both wired and wireless networking. This is almost certainly a software issue and probably not a driver related one.

Is the windows firewall running at the same time as zone alarm?

Ideally if I were having this kind of issue a windows re-install would be far quicker than attempting to isolate and solve it.

[mosherben]

Yup everything seems fine for accessing and playing files

I'll check about windows firewall when I get home Yes, both run cuncurrently

Aye I would do a re-install but I have loads of stuff on here that I don't want to get rid off.. like 60 gigs of stuff but I only have a CD-RW