I'm having problems with internet browsers on my laptop and it's driving me mad.

It doesn't matter whether I use Chrome, Firefox or IE (all of which I have installed) -- the browser regularly and randomly returns "page not found" errors when I'm using the internet. The only solution is to close all browsers and wait 5 minutes. Then you can try again (until the next time it randomly stops working).

It's not the internet connection itself, because other web-based services continue to work fine on my laptop (email, Skype, etc.). Also other devices on the same wireless network (my girlfriend's laptop, my PDA, my Wii) all browse web pages without problems.

I presume this is some kind of software problem, but for months I haven't been able to find a fix. Any suggestions?

For info I'm using a Sony Vaio FE21M with XP Media Edition installed, factory hardware except for 2GB RAM.

I hope you can help, this is driving me mad...

its pretty simple problem ... with SP2 MS introduced a feature that limits the number of half open connections on a machine

half open = connections that are being opened

since Fx and other stuff opens many connections at once (pipelining) it can happen rather quickly, that the limit of 10 is reached, especially if you are using multiple applications at once, or even a file sharing app ... which opens massive amounts of connections.

solution: http://www.lvllord.de/

get this tool and set the limit to e.g. 35
the problems should immediatly disappear ...

If you want to verify that ... right click "My computer" --> manage --> Events --> system and search for event number 4226 ... which is the too many half open connections notifier

Thanks Mertsch, but when I checked the system events there were no instances of event number 4226. There were lots of others, but no 4226.

Could it be something else? Or is it possible it wouldn't show up here?

I don't know why they do not show up ... but chances are 99% that that is your problem ... anyway you can't do anything wrong with the tool from lvllord

it works 100% even with the most recent version / patches of windows xp and you can revert the changes at any time by simply backing up the TCPIP.SYS file (done by the tool anyway) .... so I would just try it out

Tried it, set half open ports to 35, and still having the same problems. Any other ideas?

try visiting a site directly through the ip address when you are experiencing this problem

e.g. http://78.47.197.43 instead of http://warp2search.net

does that help ?

I think I've tracked the problem down to router firewall settings, which I have now tweaked. Strange though that even before changing the firewall settings, all other computers on the WLAN were using the internet fine.

Anyway now sorted, thanks!