Blocked web sites

I have recently replaced a Netgear FGW114P with a DGN2000.

When I first connected the speed was very slow but over night it seems to have sorted itself out and the speedchecker at "bandwidthtest"is now showing it to be slightly faster than with the old kit. I haven't tried the wireless connections yet but I have an issue with web pages not loading.

Currently I have 2 pc's connected via ethernet:
- a desktop running VISTA 32 and using IE7, and
- a laptop running XP and IE6

for some reason a lot of pages wont load on the desktop but I have not had any similar issues with the laptop.

Browsing the web I have seen recommendations to drop the MTU in chunks until the issue is resolved, but I don't wont to change any router settings when the laptop appears to not have an issue.

Any ideas?

You could use the ping command to see if the problem is related to MTU or not.

From a Windows command prompt (Start->Run cmd [enter])

ping -f -l 1472 www.bbc.co.uk

Then reduce 1472 by 10 until you no longer get the "packet needs to be fragmented" error message or �Request timed out.� Then increase by 1 until you are 1 less from getting again, "packet needs to be fragmented" message or �Request timed out�.

Then adds 28, example 1402 + 28 = 1430.

If you have no problems with 1472 on the problem sites it would seem to rule out MTU as a problem.

Do you have the same nameservers (DNS entries) set up on desktop and laptop?

As a general rule you want to set the router to 1500 MTU and do any experimenting with smaller values on the computers themselves.

Do you know what the MTU values are on the two computers now?

Another possibility is that the DNS is hardcoded to a reliable server on one PC, but to the router which is using an slightly unreliable ISP provided one.

It was the DNS settings - I had left it as default - I checked Plusnet site and loaded their primary/secondary settings - and now its fine.

What a knowledgeable bunch on here

Thanks