smithyandlisa

Hello all,

I'm looking for all the techie guys and gals. You know who you are. I have a problem with our new pc. I'd be happy to call in an engineer, but we've lived here 4 years, never met any Brits, or anyone who speaks more English than Hello, how are you? My French is pretty reasonable, but dealing with a technical computer problem is going to be difficult.

I'll be as brief as possible.

A couple of months ago bought a new pc. HP core i5, ATI Radeon graphics card, Windows 7. Every time I try to look at websites with lots of pics, it loses the connection immediately. I like to look at Femail on the Daily Mail site, all the celeb news, and that's guaranteed to shut it down within 2 minutes. I wait sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes 30 mins and it returns. It's not only when I look at image rich sites, but that's always a sure fire shutdown.

The little yellow triangle tells me "The DNS server isn't responding. Contact your network administrator." Also.. "Your computer is trying to use a DNS server that is incorrect or doesn't exist."

The odd thing is that our laptop usually works on the wifi, (has only lost it's sonnection a couple of times with the same error message) and the internet phone always works.

I don't know whether or not to plug the old tower back in and see if it's an issue between the tower and the modem (Orange Livebox, which has worked perfectly for 3 years) or whether it's something obvious that I'm missing. The problem definitely started the day we plugged in the new tower, so I'm guessing that the new pc and the modem have an unhappy relationship.

Just thought of something else. Try attaching photos to hotmail either as attachments or as an album, forget it. It won't happen. Maybe just one, but any more and down she goes.

I'm totally lost. Can anyone help?

Thanks for reading

Andrew58

Sounds like changing the setting for DNS server would help.

https://store.opendns.com/setup/oper...stem/windows-7

smithyandlisa

Hey Andrew, I did exactly as you suggested and it works a treat. Can't thank you enough! You're a

I just hope it's secure!!

smithyandlisa

Actually, I just tried attaching photos again in Hotmail, and whilst it didn't shut it down, it's not having it! Is this an unrelated problem? Actually after 4 minutes, it's just starting to work, albeit at snails pace. Perhaps the internet out here in the middle of nowhere is just slooooow.

Tweedpipe

I'm no I.T. wizard by any means, but often had success trouble-shooting Windows issues myself. Since moving to a Mac however, rarely a problem - all is superb!

A few thoughts. What are the sizes of the photos you are trying to attach? Are they huge megapixel images of 3Mb each or more?
Also does the computer have adequate memory? I would assume that today's i5 based computers have a min of 4Gb. If for example you have 2Gb (or less) that could affect the performance in general - depending on what it's being used to do.

Now I'll hand you back to the experts.......

Tweedpipe

Be aware that most e-mail services won't allow you to send more than 10Mb of attachments, which relates to approx 4 high resolution images. Worth checking the size of each.
Ref HERE.

smithyandlisa

Thanks Tweedpipe,

I'm within the limits on hotmail, but they just take forever, or they shut down the pc. I did manage to send 23 pics this morning, all varying sizes and I'm guessing, but I suppose it took about 15-20 minutes to load them.

Ka Ora!

http://www.speedtest.net/

Run the test and post the down and up speeds, Orange are prone to really throttling upload speeds.

smithyandlisa

I think this is what you want!!

Ping 119ms Download 0.5mbps Upload 0.09mbps

What now??

Andrew58

That's snail pace ( a dead snail more like) internet - there is the problem as the upload speed is so slow.

smithyandlisa

Hmmmmm, I thought so. I know that when we moved here 4 years ago we had problems with the connectivity and the when the engineer arrived she said that obviously internet had never been received at the property as there was no signal. We assured her that it had worked, albeit sporadically and she tweaked a few things and we have been connected ever since. However, with pictures it is sloooow.

Your fix from earlier though really seems to have done the trick, so that has improved things greatly, and if it takes 20 mins to upload my pics, that's just enough time for a glass of wine. How can that be bad?

Andrew58

Have a look at the mb size of the photographs you are uploading. I would send small sized files if you can. Depends what they are to be used for at the other end.

dennerlymum

Just out of interest what is a good speed??

Mine says

ping 91ms down load 1.95 mbps and upload 0.26 mbps

smithyandlisa

Yes, I could easily reduce them as they're only ever for friends and family.

smithyandlisa

Well it looks a whole lot better than mine!!