Hi everyone,

I had a Compaq desktop with windows XP for ROUGHLY five years when I gave it to my dad a few months ago. It was never the best computer becasue it didn't have a lot of memory and such, but it always worked decently well for me albeit a bit slow. Before giving it to my dad I reinstalled windows using the recovery disk that came with it so he would have a clean SLATE to work off from.

Within days of having it, he said he would often get the "page cannot be displayed" page when surfing the web. He uses dial up msn by the way, which is what I also used for the last couple years. He said it was happening more and more, and the last time I went on it I couldn't get any web pages to come up, despite it saying that I was connected to the internet.

The actual computer seems to be working fine, it boots up and shuts down just fine, opens any computer (ie non internet) only functions just fine, but I just can't get it to do anything online. I am quite certain I used this recovery disk to reinstall at least once when I owned the computer and have never had any problems like this. I have no idea what to do.

My only thought was that his phone cord was damaged and when I tried going online the other day I had to fiddle with the cord and tape it into the plug before I could finally get a dialtone to get online. I have been TOLD by several computer people that this isn't the case, but is it at all possible that the cord being damaged gave it enough connection to connect to the internet but not enough to actually do anything?

Did I do something wrong when reinstalling windows? Is there some setting I should change? I already checked the firewall and that seems fine. I can't figure out why reinstalling windows would make it impossible to be online, I am in need of any possible causes for this becasue my dad gave me money for this computer and is getting kind of MAD that it isn't doing him any good. Thanks!I'd bring the computer to someones house who has high speed internet DSL or Broadband and see if it behaves the same. Also while connected to High Speed do all the MS Critical Updates and make sure that it has an up to date antivirus. The restore CD probably came with a 90 day trial of Norton AV.

As far as the phone cord goes, I also agree that it is likely not the cord, but since it is damaged and cords are cheap to replace, its best to eliminate that from the problems equation.

If you see it behaving itself on high speed and not dial up then we have a direction to go in with that, and if it is misbehaving with high speed, then the system definately has an issue of some sort with the browser.