This one is baffling me so any help much appreciated.
I have a Dell laptop with the above. Automatic updates are on. A few days ago on booting IE was unable to display any web page. Likewise Outlook cannot find my mail servers (pop3 and SMTP). I have an XP desktop on a peer to peer LAN with exactly the same settings for DNS etc and it still works fine. Both machines share the router to the internet connection so it is not the ISP or the phone line. The problem seems to be that the Win 7 laptop can't resolve urls into IP addresses. But why??
I have tried to see what sort of problem this might be but am running out of ideas on how to fix it. So far I have tried as follows without success:
+ re-booted my router
+ re-booted my laptop
+ uninstalled and re-installed all 3 driver updates Dell gave me (firmware, LAN card and wireless card)
+ checked DNS server IP address is the same on good and bad computers
+ checked that DNS server andDNS settings for IPv4 are set to "Obtain DNS server automatically" and "Obtain an IP address automatically”
+ Tried changing the DNS server to google (8.8.8.8) instead
+ Checked these same settings work fine on the other computer
+ Flushed the DMS cache
+ Tried both IE and Chrome
+ Cleared all history from both browsers
+ re-set winsock using: netsh winsock reset catalog (resets winsock entries)
+ re-set TCPIP stack using: netsh int ip reset reset.log hit (resets TCP/IP stack)
+ Done a full virus scan with Trend micro
+ checked that a numeric IP address typed into Chrome address bar does work (IE doesn’t allow this as always adds “http/” which messes it up)
+ Did a system restore to before it happened