At 13:51 09/08/04, Maurice J. Reid wrote:
>The major problem I have is that regardless of  browser,...if the
>browser lies dormant (unused), whether open or not, for an hour or
>two, it will not connect to any sites - "page not available",
>"cannot find site" etc. (message dependent on browser). However,
>I can connect with my provider's (Earthlink) diagnostic site by
>using the numerical  IP address. All diagnostics pass, (pings, etc).
>But still no change. If I restart, everything is fine. If I
>continue using browser, everything works fine. If I then don't use
>for a while, de ja vu all over again. Have to restart. Specs are
>Dell 2400 Dimension, Pent 4, 2.66GHz, No virus that I'm aware of,
>384mb memory. Tried provider, they were no help. Appreciate any input.

Hi Maurice

Can you get your connection back if you release
and then renew your IP lease? That is, run

ipconfig /release

and then run

ipconfig /renew

from the command prompt. Try

ipconfig /?

to see more options. (I don't recall if doing a "renew" will
automatically do a "release" first.)

By command prompt, I mean running

%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe

from a shortcut. (Find the file, right click, choose properties,
create shortcut.) %SystemRoot% is usually C:\windows or C:\winnt.

If you use the Run utility (from the Start menu), the window
may close too quickly to see what happened.

If this helps, I can email you the file wntipcfg.exe which is a
graphical version (window with buttons) of ipconfig.exe. It's a
small 145 KB file that came with the Windows 2000 Resource Kit.
(It works in Windows XP as well.)

What I would do in your situation is run one of the time utilities
every few minutes. That might keep your connection alive. (I say
"might" because you said that pings still work.) I use the free
utility  "Dimension 4" from Thinking Man Software:
<http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/index.htm>
You can set it to run automatically at any interval. And you can set
it to startup automatically when Windows starts. (I have it set
to run at windows startup and every 4 minutes after that as a
"keep alive" utility. It will run hidden in the background. Before
using it, my cable connection used to slow to a crawl after a period
of inactivity. Now all is fine. By the way, running this program takes
only an extremely small amount of bandwidth. It will not noticeably
affect your other Internet activities in that tenth of a second or so
that it takes to run...even if you have a slow dial up connection.

Regards,
Bill

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