Cant open websites on any browser but connected to internet?

So a friend just dropped his computer off for me to fix. I took a look at it and began my normal testing.

His complaint is he cant open any websites.

Its virus free from what I can tell, its a fairly new computer with little installed on it. The thing is connecting to the internet, the network control panel says so and I ran a ping command from the command prompt and it worked also.

He had IE and Chrome on there, I just put FireFox on there and none of them will open any webpages.

I tried to reset the internet stuff with netsh winsock reset from the command promt. I tried to restore the hosts file with a 3rd party application.

I made sure that the TCP/IP settings looked correct and the LAN settings looked correct.

I ran Malwarebytes, CCleaner, and Spybot and he has AVG on there (though I just uninstalled that thinking it could be what caused the problem)

Im pretty sure this is some rare configuration issue or a corrupted file that I just have to find and fix. So any guesses?

 

Boot into safe mode?

 

Is dhcp screwed up?? Is it even running? Has your friend messed with various service startups??

Is he a fan of places like BlackViper and might he have gotten in over his head? I seem to recall that BV has finally seen the light and now provides a means to reset all service startups to installation defaults.

Check network adapter drivers, windows firewall, an antivirus app blocking 'everything', stuff like that.

Take everything 'protective' off the machine, antivirus, firewalls, etc, etc. All of it. Disable windows firewall. Deinstall all browsers and plugins except for MSIE.

Are you SURE that you have the correct default hosts file in place?

Do your best to place the machine back to a 'neutral' state.

Run an ipconfig /all and post the output here.

It would also be useful to know what OS version is on the machine.......

 

Visa 64bit its a HP machine.

I'll see if I get more time to work on it tomorrow.

Since there is so little installed on the machine I recommended to him just to let me backup his personal files and restore windows anew.

But before I do that I will give it one more good long session of trouble shooting.

 

"DNS" , check it , you can try google ip 74.125.39.99 to check if it opened then its a problem with ur DNS

 

Have you run ipconfig /flushdns in an elevated CMD window?

--L.

 

nope will try it.

 

I had this same problem happen on my sisters friend's computer.

He would connect to the internet just fine, and skype would load up just fine, and everything else, but the only things that wouldn't work were the internet browsers.

I eventually just made him a new account, and deleted the old one (he didn't have anything he needed off of it), and it worked out fine.

 

Its likely your DNS if you can ping but cant resolve hostnames.

- Try OpenDNS or Google DNS (8.8.8.8)

- Check browsers for any proxy settings

 

tried the flush dns and to setup the google dns both are a no-go

edit 1: also tried to run these in command prompt netsh winsock reset catalog, and netsh int ip reset reset.log

no luck

edit 2: fixed it!

I fixed it with the Norton Removal Tool!

I do not/did not know he had norton on this system, it was not in add/remove programs but after reading this site: http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-19117-internet-connected-but-can-t-browse

Somewhere about half way down somebody used the tool that had the same problem as me and it fixed there problems. So I figured why not? Sure enough that was the problem, some Norton files must have been blocking the internet browsers.

I'll call my friend now and give him the good news.

 

Good job. Another thing I always check is the proxy settings... sometimes some malware will change those and use itself as a proxy to inject ads and monitor information, and when it's removed the "proxy" disappears but the settings are still there and then no more Internet from any browser. Seen it happen more than once.

 

Malware like Norton Internet Security....

I agree...the proxy server seems to be the new favorite trick among malware wrters.

In fact, running the NRT probably likely reset the proxy server settings after Norton messed it up.

 

I've tried everything that the OP tried, but it hasn't worked for me. I know for a fact that I had a virus, though I seem to have effectively removed it. What remains, however, is the lack of internet connectivity even though ipconfig shows that my router DHCP is working.

So what's to be done about restoring proxy settings to a pre-infection state? I'm competent implementing fixes but I'm in the dark when it comes to understanding the finer points. Any ideas?

 

Well for the sake of everyone's time I thought I should say that I impatiently decided to go forward with a system restore. So any of your tips - while appreciated! - won't be implemented.