I was at my parents house the other day and was experiencing some connection problems with my laptop. The WiFi access was working well but i couldn’t browse. Other online-aware programs were fine but the browsing was gone. Since my laptop was the only device with this issue i though that somehow vista or other program - i install a lot of them - was causing this.

To make a long story short, i ended formatting my laptop. The problem was still there and i was very frustrated. During lunch i suddenly thought of making some tests and pings to the ISP dns servers.

Well, it turned out that one of the two DNS server was down and oddly enough my laptop was the only device being assigned that one on the network by the WiFi router.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, read the following lines to learn how to manually change the DNS server settings in Windows Vista or XP.

You need to know the DNS server addresses of your ISP in order to manually enter them. In this case, i just entered to the router’s configuration page and looked for the addresses under Connection Settings.

• Go to Control Panel - Networks - Network Connections.
• Right-click the network connection you are having problems with and choose properties.
• Select Internet Protocol (IPv4) and then click on the properties button.
• Manually enter the preferred and alternative DNS server addresses here. You can try and change the order.
• Click OK.
• Do the above step for IPv6 protocol.

You now should be able to browse normally if at least one server is working.

Take into account that this manual configuration will only work for the Internet connection that is having problems. If you need to connect to a problem-free connection, undo the steps and choose Automatic DNS settings.

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