Internet Problems in WinME

[SNGX1275]

I'm currently on winter break from school so I'm at my parents house. There is a problem on this computer with its internet connection, I'll describe it.
Internet Explorer opened
The window to dial up opens, I click connect.
It connects at 52,000bps (normal for this computer)
Now at any time the problem occurs: I will click a link and it will come up "page cannot be displayed", the same page I believe that opens if you click work offline on a page that you don't have in cache.
Normally AIM will continue to work once this occurs, but opening up Opera does not fix the problem, and since they use different engines I don't believe this to be a problem only with how IE deals with the internet.
Another thing I have noticed, it seems to happen more when a page is loading up and I hit stop and then click a link. It doesnt' do it all the time when I do that, but that seems to bring it on, although this may just be a concidence.
Another possibly important observation... I was dialing up today and while it was connecting I hit stop, and then went to favorites for the forums, I also opened up AIM while it was dialing up and as soon as the connection was established I got the page cannot be loaded and AIM said a connection with the server could not be established. I have not tried to ping any servers, guess I should have done that, I'll update this post once it happens again and I feel like trying to get online again.
Now when this all happens, its not as simple as just closing the browser and disconnecting from the internet and then dialing up again. In order to fix it the computer must be restarted as far as I have found out.

System Specs:
IE 6.0.2800.1106
Windows ME (haven't been to windowsupdate in about a month and a half, yeh I should probably do that, but dial up is so slow...)
PII 300Mhz
192Megs RAM

I probably will have the time tonight to go to windowsupdate, but in the meantime if any suggestions other than that could be offered I'd appriciate it.

 

[PHATMAN5050]

I had a similar problem with my computer just losing internet connection, I tried everything, different router port, different cables, and lastly different NIC. When I changed my NIC everything works fine again. I would suggest buying another modem, they're only like $10 anyways.

 

[SNGX1275]

Never thought about it possibly being hardware related... it may be, but I dont think it is because: It doesnt' seem to happen at any set time after being online, it only seems to happen when I'm making this little 300Mhz computer do lots of things at once (like multiple IE windows, winamp, and AIM).

Edit: It is not the modem now, just got 100% confirmation that AIM still works when internet addresses don't. Heard from a little bird that it may be a DNS issue... since I don't know anything in that area I may need some guidance. If it was a DNS issue what steps do I take to remedy this, and why doesn't going to the specific IP of a site work?

 

[SNGX1275]

Well here's the latest:

Decided I'd fire up our old Macintosh with a 28.8modem, so I did that, and suffered through the slow processor and the slow modem and tried loading up web pages and stopping them part way through and such. Well what happened led me to believe it is infact a problem outside of the WinME computer - pages wouldn't load up. BUT then I thought I'd pick up the phone just to make sure it was still connected, and I got a dial tone!?!, so I guess the modem decided to disconnect. The PPP program that MacOS 8.1 uses still thought it was connected though. So what does that mean? Does it just mean that computer sucks and it cut itself off without realizing it? Is that modem just extremely sensitive to line conditions and disconnects itself when it doesn't like something? OR does it mean that there is infact a problem that needs to be resolved with my parent's ISP and that modem just disconnected itself when that problem with the ISP occured?
or am I overanalyzing this

Well anyway those are just a few more things for you guys to think about. I did visit windowsupdate and got 5 critical updates, but they seemed to only be concerned with security issues. I just did that a little while ago so this is the first I've been on the internet since I restarted - so I dont' know if I'm going to continue to have this problem.
I'm going back to my house tomarrow so I dont' know if I will have time to do this, but I'm planning on seeing before I leave if my sister's computer which is running Win2000 expierences this. The problem is that I need to get to my house soon after I wake up, and it seems my mom is always on the phone , so I don't know if I'll get a chance. If I do I'll post, my guess is though that she will not have this problem and its something corrupted in Windows on This WinME computer, I don't know why I think that, but something tells me its just this computer....

 

[SNGX1275]

Well I'm on the right track I think

I tried to duplicate the problem on my sisters 2k machine, and I couldn't replicate the problem. So I think I was correct in saying its something exclusive to that ME box. I'm back at my house now so I'm going to bring Windows2000 back with me tomarrow and reformat and install 2k, and I'm almost certain that will fix the problem. If not - at least they will have a more stable OS on it.

 

[SNGX1275]

Well it seems this has everyone stumped. So when I couldn't figure out the exact cause of the problem I got desperate and formatted this computer and installed Windows2000. How I eventually got Windows2000 on is a story in its own though....

Well anyway - I've been on the internet a couple of times today since I got it installed and all seems to be well so far, hopefully it will continue to stay good. Got some minor issues with Windows2000 though; the computer has to manually be switched off (yeh that was talked about somewhere on the boards - I'll look into it if I get bored), the speakers pop real loud on a restart or shut down, and the thing takes a long time to boot up, I'd say close to 4 or 5 mintues before things settle down.
Oh well, at least it seems to be running well.