Internet Explorer / Firefox issues on Windows 2000

January 30, 2004 11:49 AM

I hang my head in shame as I post this, but here goes: in my zealous effort to eliminate browser helper objects on 2 Windows 2000 Pro Dells in our computer lab, I somehow seem to have eliminated IE and Mozilla's ability to browse, as well. I can ping our webserver so I know they can get online, but I keep getting "unable to resolve this (or any other) web page" errors. Do I now have to reinstall IE or wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows to make this work? Or....
posted by Lynsey to computers & internet (4 comments total)

may be stating the obvious here, but your problem is with dns resolution. if you "dnslookup google.com" (don't have a windows box handy, but i think that's the right command) what do you get? did you alter firewall settings? have you tried looking at a numerical address url in the browser? can you see http://209.10.108.201 for example?
posted by andrew cooke at 11:53 AM on January 30, 2004

The right command is "nslookup."
posted by zsazsa at 1:02 PM on January 30, 2004

I've sometimes found that going:

IE > Tools > Internet Options > Connections > Setup

And going through the wizard, can help sort this.
posted by armoured-ant at 6:39 AM on January 31, 2004

Hey, everyone, thanks for the advice. nslookup showed me local host, 127.0.0.1 which helped me to figure out what the problem really was. I right-clicked on network properties, then on local area connection. In here I found that the 2 computers had lost their primary DNS setting, which I quickly re-entered. Now all is well and I have 2 machines back up and able to go online. AskMe is a wonderful thing!
posted by Lynsey at 10:56 AM on February 2, 2004