Unable to access links/webpages

[vishodhan]

hi, recentely bought a new Dell mini 9 system with 512 RAM / 4GB SSD,installed windows xp,it works fine but the problem is i can't access some web site, I can get Google,yahoo search but can't access certain commercial web site .What is wrong???? i tried with another laptop it doesn't give any problem.is that any thing wrong with windows xp or my connection.please help!!!!

[Trio]

Turn off the pop-up blocker

• Internet Explorer SP2 includes the ability to block pop-up windows. This new feature may block some Web pages. To turn off the Pop-Up Blocker, follow these steps: On the Tools menu in Internet Explorer, click Internet Options, and then click the General tab.
• Click the Privacy tab.
• In the Pop-Up Blocker section, click to clear the Block pop-ups check box.
• Click Apply.
• Click OK.

[deveritt]

The reason you can't access a specific website if you are using a cable or broadband connection is because your router is set to obtain your IP address automatically. Usually this isn't a big deal, but if your cable company did something funky recently to the way they cache'd the DNS or are working from an old cache, it can result in you not being able to access a certain website.

[Techno01]

• Examine your Windows hosts file. The filename is just "hosts" and the location varies, but it's usually in or under the "Windows" folder. Use Start->Search for (or Find) files and folders if you need to. Open that file with notepad, and delete any lines you see with those domain names in them. Then save the file.
  
• If you find nothing there, then download and run the two free programs AdAware from lavasoftusa.com and Spybot Search & Destroy from safer-networking.org.
  
• If those two don't find anything, you can also try Hijack This, but be careful, because this one is sort of an "Experts" program and you can damage your Windows installation with it if you're not careful.
  
• Finally, if you are going to use IE, go into Internet Options and set the security setting for the "Internet Zone" to "High." This will probably cause you to get a lot of "permission" prompts from sites you visit; Just add them to the "Trusted Sites" list to allow IE to access them with lower security settings and bypass the prompts.

[Techguru01]

The most common cause of this problem that I have seen is Web accelerators that use the HOSTS file to create the illusion of faster web browsing can actually cause problems rather than speed things up.Programmes that use the HOSTS file to speed things up have one basic flaw - they work by recording IP addresses saving you that millisecond that it takes for your Web browser to convert a URL to an IP address. If the IP address of a Web site changes for any reason you can no longer get to the site until the recorded IP address is updated in the HOSTS file (which invariably does not happen).