IE "The Page Cannot Be Displayed"
 

I get this trouble on my main computer (Charter Communications Cable high-speed internet) along with my two wireless laptops (DI-614+ D-Link router). On many pages, I have to hit refresh in order for the page to be displayed.
It has not always done this, and I cannot blame spyware as I have Ad-Aware, Spybot, SpywareBlaster running and I have used the CWShredder.

Someone suggested the router, so i unplugged it and reset it. Same problem.

The thing is, it has not bene this way. It started about a motnh ago.

P.S. All computers are running Windows XP.

P.P.S. Please do not suggest Mozilla as I am not a fan as it resizes pages so they do not fit properly and look extremely weird.
Thanks in advance.

::Bump::

Someone please help. Do you think it is the ISP? My laptop does not do this at school with their internet and does it on all 3 computers at my house with the cable.

Well, if it makes ya feel any better, my DLS at home behind a router does the exact same fuckin thing, and I've never found a fix for it. :) I just hit refresh and life goes on.

-Lasereth

I have also seen this problem on my dsl line. Although my problem seems to be traced happen more when there is a lot of downloading being done, so it could just be a lot of connections are trying to be made and some are just failing.

And yes, what Lasereth said about hitting refresh usually works (unless the site you are trying to get to is down).

hmmm i have charter too, and i dont have this problem, maybe you have a bad DNS server you are sending request to.

my 3 DNS servers i use (they are charters)

24.205.224.36
66.215.64.14
24.205.1.14

try switching to them and see if that helps. or just call charter and hit 000 (or maybe it is 00) and that should get you to an operator, if it does not just wait and wait and search through the endless list till you get a live person.

That would be my thought. It sounds like the DNS request is either getting lost every now and then, or somehow being blocked by the router.

Does it still do it if you type in the IP address of the page instead of the hostname. If not then it's probably the DNS server.

There are a couple of things that can be done to help the problem. The most effective would probably be to house a small DNS server on the inside of you firewall, or even on the computer itself. It would check that one first, then go to an external DNS server if your local one didn't have the IP.

For pages that you visit a lot it's most likely your best bet. It would also speedup the access time since you would have the IP address on the local machine.

You could also open a command prompt and run a tracert to a site that frequently has this problem. Then post the results back here.

c:\tracert google.com

Sounds DNS related.

Are you behind a firewall? DNS uses TCP port 53 for the initial request, then moves to a port >1024 for SYNs. If a f/w doesn't allow high syn requests, the behavior you described will occur.

I've had that problem ONLY on IE. I suggest switching to Opera since you dont like Mozilla (Although, I use Firefox and I've never had any problem like that) and seeing if the same problem occurs. Sorry I cant help more than that.

I have charter and noticed this same thing the last week. Rebooting the modem does seem to help.

You could try to do a packet capture of IE's traffic, see what happens. The other guys here are probably right with the issue being related to DNS. You can use nslookup to see what happens with your DNS requests.
To find out which DNS servers are best for you, make yourself a list, and try them with the syntax:
nslookup <server to lookup, eg: www.google.com> <dns server ip>

As for packet capturing, the only free (GPL) options that come to mind right now are Packetyzer/Ethereal, you'll probably find the Packetyzer GUI easier to handle (the background application is Ethereal in both cases)

How do I find out the DNS information?

Some great info here. I find that I get that sometimes, too, with Comcast cable. Pretty rare, though. It seems to happen more with sites that I am logged in to, as opposed to something like google that does not verify users. Refreshing simply 'starts over' from the beginning of loading the page, and IE often does not offer the same info (userid, etc) if the page is refreshed. It is a security thing.

Call your cable provider. Here's a tip: if they can't solve it quickly, call back in a few minutes and get another tech who can solve it.