Here's a new one..

[TreasonousBastard]

I think.

At least once a day when refreshing a screen, my browsers give me an error message-- basically telling me i have no internet access. A few minutes later everything's back to normal.

This might be browser quirks, but it happens on two versions of Opera, and Firefox-- they all go down at the same time. I don't use Chrome and never got around to checking if IE has the problem. And, Thunderbird is able to connect with my mail servers on 5 email accounts while this is going on, so I do have net access.

Anybody know if it could be something in the bowels of Win 8.1 causing the problem? Or maybe Cablevision is the problem and has different ways of connecting to the web and to mail.

[Drew Richards]

1. Helpful diagnostic tools to determine if it is the communication thread of the browsers or your

Internet connection are ping and traceroute and Nslookup....keep a DOS window open in the background and as soon as the link error occurs run a ping -t 8.8.8.8 if you get ping fails and then it starts back up you know it is a network, network card, cable or hardware issue and can proceed with network diagnostics...

Network issues coulld be as simple as patial failing service provider DNS
Test and fix by using google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4

Failing ethernet card
Update drivers

Bad cable...
Swap cables

Failing router
Swap routers

Routing update or routing fail from service provider...

Instead of just pings run a tracert 8.8.8.8 and see WHERE the connection fails...at your connection....at the service providers gateway to the internet...or on the internet backbone...

If it runs a continuous ping then it is more likely a failing DNS response, network routing or a hardware connection issue such as a failing cable or ethernet card.

An easy way to see if it is DNS failure is in the DOS window do a ping first...if it does ping then do an nslookup www.yahoo.com if it fails to reply with yahoo ip addresses you know it is an intermittant DNS lookup failure....

Change DNS servers and retry.

There are some complicated advanced keepalive changes to the ethernet card that can be tried but that is not recommended and a last resort...

For example you can actually change your card to never sleep thus it sends out keepalives every 20 seconds.

Hope this helps.

Drew.