Thanks guys. Guess I'll go on an expedition tomorrow.

ETA: oh, and yay, it looks like there's a Radio Shack near some other errands I had planned. The BB's not far either, but kind of a pain to get to.

Yeah, again I actually rec Godaddy for domain name hosting. Just use a different service for actual web hosting. Better to keep them separate anyway. One company handling both gives them too many ways to screw you in a dispute.

I use steadfast networks which has so far proven cheap and reliable. Evil Jimi also uses them.

As do I. They're cheap, but have top-notch customer service. My domains are registered through dotster. I've never had any trouble with them.

Okay, so I have a problem that's been driving me crazy the last few months.

I got a new Macbook in October and I love it. But it has this issue and I don't know how to begin dealing with it.

I have a wireless router and a DSL connection through Earthlink. Periodically, and by periodically I mean frequently, and by frequently I mean several times in every hour, I will click on a link and it will fail to resolve.

Except by "fail to resolve" I mean what I get is not a 404, but the Earthlink search page. Blah blah this page does not exist, perhaps you mean this other site?

But this is for links like my own LJ. Or a specific page on someone else's LJ, even though my LJ friends' page resolves. Or B.org. Pages which absolutely exist. And I clearly have a connection to the internet, because I got the Earthlink search page, so it's not a problem with the wireless connection (which has its own problems, but this isn't it).

Please note that I never had this problem with my old Dell laptop. It's something specific to the way the Macbook interacts with the DSL, I guess.

Anyone have any ideas of what I need to do to diagnose and correct this? I've had DSL through Earthlink for years and never had any problems with them.

Another random question: my computer just randomly turned off and had some trouble turning back on. It did, obviously, but where should I go looking to see what might be going on?

Consuela -

have you tried using other browsers and see if you happen to have the same things happen?

It could be an incompatibility between Earthlink's DNS servers and Mac OS. Can you try using OpenDNS for a while and seeing if the problem goes away?

I thought she might need to adjust browser settings.

Consuela, I second Rob's suggestion for OpenDNS. I wonder if you did some install disk for Earthlink? Those are notorious for installing stupid stuff. On the Mac, its usually their slow DNS. I don't know how savy you are, so if you want help on how to change that:

System Pref's -> Network -> Advanced button (lower right) -> DNS tab

Oh, thank you folks. So I checked it with Safari, and yes I got the same problem--while looking at the OpenDNS website, coincidentally enough.

omnis audis, I have not installed any Earthlink software on the Macbook. I have opened the DNS tab you told me about, but what should I do with it?

And what does OpenDNS do? What do I do to access it? Is it an application?