a couple of times a day I seem unable to access various websites for a period of about 20 mins. Its only on my laptop, the htc desire and PS3 seem to connect fine at all times. Like right now I can't use the bbc site. I just get server not found message. This happens with both IE and firefox.

The other sites it does it with are;
Google, most often
Facebook
Hotmail



I have just got a new netgear router which coincided with the start of the problem.

Anyone have any ideas?

Ive had something similar - its all to do with how the netgear relays the DNS entries from your ISP's DNS server.

There's a good post here showing some tests - http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=1689

and here

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23/~/how-to-troubleshoot-dns-resolution-problem%3F

What fixed mine was i unticked the 'get automatic DNS' option within the router settings and staticly set the DNS servers within my ISP's cloud (orange in my case).

Worked a treat ever since (touch wood).

thats great mate thank you, I'll try and fix it tomorrow.

We have seen this a lot recently with Netgear ADSL routers on the BT lines we have at work. As Tris suggests, we have started setting the DNS servers manually on the router to the public google ones (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and the problems have gone away...

Regards

Mark

Same thing happens here except the facebook queen of pish is in the seat

I use Open DNS Don't know if it has an advantage over Google?

Running a caching dns (such as Treeewalk DNS) on the client pc/laptop works well, particularly on notebooks if they have some spare capcity.

Can specify more than 2 DNS servers on a PC