over the last few weeks my compo has been playing up ie.
i go to outlook express for my daily hate mail and it wont connect,leave it for a bit and it co-operates.
latley i cant get onto some of the sites i have as faves,lcb being one of them,i just get no reaction or time out.
the last issue coincides with being unable to get into my mail,any ideas peeps?

I had symptons not dissimilar, not as extreme, but slow to connect etc, then started powering the router off overnight, all connection problems gone.

For machine speed try a disk cleanup and defrag, both in accessories - system tools.

The unable to connect bit makes it look like a DNS problem to me.

You can think of the internet DNS system a bit like a big phone book it converts a web domain name like locostbuilders.co.uk into a numerical format. Because the internet changes so quickly the DNS information held on the servers has to be updated every few hours thats when things can go wrong. The system can give problems because some ISPs don't monitor their domain name servers carefully enough or the servers can be subject to malicious attacks.

In a typical home broadband setup your router will automatically get your ISPs DNS server information from your ISP and when you start your PC it gets the DNS server info from the router.

However you can use other DNS servers in addition to or in place of your ISPs servers. Some of the best free public DNS around at the moment are the Google ones. You can set the DNS to use the Google servers either on your PC or on the router --- on the PC is probably simpler for the novice.

For instruction on how to use Google DNS see:
see http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

I'd open up a command line and try doing

ping www.google.com

to see if it's a fundamental error or it's a Winblows thing.

sheesh that lot sounds complicated.
think ill get someone to have a butch as ill bu**er it up for sure

be brave conrod you won't brek it