help!! intermittant connection to internet

fishing-girl

i have a dell xps m1330, which up to a couple of months ago worked great.
now,i can be surfing the internet ok when suddenly it either goes very slow or no page appears it just says "web site found waiting for reply"
the icon for connection says i am currently connected but sometimes it has no connection or only local.i have to refresh regularly as pages dont appear first time.
i have had virgin cable engineers out so often but never have a problem when they are here but they gave me a new modem and router to try just in case.
have tried 2 new routers - no change

have now borrowed friends laptop and we are both connecting to the samepages at the same time and hers works fine,hence i have now deducted that it must be a problem with my laptop.

looked at device manager no problems all working fine.
updated software from dell -no change

only other thing is that the graphics card died and the dell engineer replaced the mobo, could something have become dislodged?

am now at end of tether and laptop will be thrown out of window, so you had better duck santa,as you fly past.

any help or suggestions would be most appreciated

XDA

I assume that you are connecting to the Internet using a wireless connection?

Have tried tried plugging a network cable (cat 5) from your router to your laptop? That would then show if its a wireless problem.

[Deleted User]

If it's wireless, try checking what channel the router is using.. that can often fix problems if a neighbour is on the same channel and drowning your signal

fishing-girl

its not just the wireless, i have just connected the cable and it is just the same. just keeps hanging.
have also changed chanels on the router.

horace972897

Personally i would try downloading (on another PC if possible) a bootable Linux OS such as Ubuntu

You will need to burn the CD image to a CD and then power up your PC with the CD in the drive (you may need to tell your PC to boot off the CD rom drive first)

You can download Ubuntu from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

It should boot up and detect your network card etc and if your router gives out IP addresses automatically you should be able to connect to the Internet.

If web browsing is reliable when booted this way then its something software related and you best bet would be to re-install from the restore CD supplied when you bought the PC.

fishing-girl

yes,latest bios went on as the old graphics card packed in.
IE keeps freezing and restarts saying ie has a problem and needs to shut down.

horace972897

If I.E. keeps crashing have you tried downloading Firefox

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

This is an alternative web browser. Again if that works ok then its re-install time as your easiest fix. (Make sure you backup before reinstalling)

However if other apps keep crashing too then i'd go for the bootable Linux as i posted before as this will prove if its software or hardware related.

horace972897

One last thing. If you do download Ubuntu make sure you don't choose install from the boot menu. I wouldn't want you to blow away your data.

XDA

I would download either IE 7 or Mozilla Firefox and see if that works.

Sounds more like a problem with the internet browser/software than a connection/broadband problem.

Alternatively, Re-format your laptop and re-install everything (remembering to back-up your data)