Help! Computers are sending me insane!!!

[Kneedowndeano]

There are two problems that I am having.

1. I have installed SP2 on XP home and when I navigate to a new website, be it MSN, Yahoo even this one, there is a slight delay of about 10seconds before the page is displayed. If I uninstall SP2 and go back to SP1 the pages appear instantly; any ideas as to why this happens? I have cleared the cache, deleted the temp files, cookies and I am on broadband.
2. On a friends home network everything was working ok, but the wireless signal was unsecured, he wanted it to have some security so I went around to put a 128bit encryption on the signal, changed the channel to 06 and hid the SSID. All went well on the network for a few hours then I get a call say that he can’t access some sites. I went around again taking another look and nothing had changed from what I did so I was slightly baffled. I put the settings back to the original but I still can’t access to all sites (like MSN.co.uk). The router is the only item in the network that had its settings changed (Netgear DG834G v2 the white one) but changing it back has had no affect. Has anyone come across this before?

Thanks

KDD

[deva link]

Kneedowndeano said:

There are two problems that I am having. 1. I have installed SP2 on XP home and when I navigate to a new website, be it MSN, Yahoo even this one, there is a slight delay of about 10seconds before the page is displayed. If I uninstall SP2 and go back to SP1 the pages appear instantly; any ideas as to why this happens? I have cleared the cache, deleted the temp files, cookies and I am on broadband.

Have a look here - http://tinyurl.com/dsk58 - there's a lot of crap, but basically seems to say if you've got Norton then uninstall it (no good just turning it off), and make sure you're not running 2 firewalls (maybe SP2 emables windows XP's firewall?). You might find other ideas with similar searches.

Kneedowndeano said:

2. On a friends home network everything was working ok, but the wireless signal was unsecured, he wanted it to have some security so I went around to put a 128bit encryption on the signal, changed the channel to 06 and hid the SSID. All went well on the network for a few hours then I get a call say that he can’t access some sites. I went around again taking another look and nothing had changed from what I did so I was slightly baffled. I put the settings back to the original but I still can’t access to all sites (like MSN.co.uk). The router is the only item in the network that had its settings changed (Netgear DG834G v2 the white one) but changing it back has had no affect. Has anyone come across this before?

Off the top of my head the only thing I can suggest is to make sure you reset the router (either a physical - not in software - reset button or power it off for 10 seconds and power up again). I've had 2 (SMC and Linksys) where settings didn't seem to 'take' unless I did this.

>> Edited by deva link on Friday 26th August 15:10

[malman]

1) xp sp2 turns on firewall by default. could be something weird happening if you already have software firewall on there (noton, mcafee, zone alarm, sygate etc). disable either or both for testing. If you're behind a router then you're protected by NAT (probably) but software firewalls will prevent outgoing malware generally so they are still worth having.

Sounds a bit like DNS delay so goto a command prompt and type "nslookup www.msn.co.uk" it should come back immediately with the IP address and no errors.

You could try that on problem 2 also




>> Edited by malman on Friday 26th August 22:39

>> Edited by malman on Friday 26th August 22:40

[Kneedowndeano]

Problem 2 is now sorted. For future referance AOL uses an MTU setting of 1400, not 1500.

I'm still battling with the 1st problem, i've tried what you have all suggested, but its still playing silly buggers.