Windows Vista and Slow Internet Connections

On April 24 2007, I brought a new laptop (Acer Aspire 5100) pre-loaded with Microsoft Vista - Home Premium edition from my local Circuit City store for $669.00 + 6% tax. There was a $100.00 mail-in-rebate to make the deal sweeter.

As a previous owner of a Acer products (Acer Aspire 3000 laptop in 2005 and 19" LCD monitor this February), I found the products to have good performance.

I must admit, I see to have the incredible (bad) luck of being stuck with a lemons first time around when it comes to buying Acer laptops. Fortunately for me, Circuit City readily exchanged them with some inspection and replacements have worked very well. (Let me know, there is anybody out there that shares the same experience.)

First time, it was hard disk crash within 24 hours after the purchase. This time around it was the Wireless Ethernet Card. It kept dropping connections several times within span of a minute or so. Finally after a week of fighting the beast with replacing drivers, configure settings, I gave up and got a replacement from Circuit City, this weekend.

The wireless connection in the new laptop stayed strong but the internet connection was dragging its feet like a snail bearing a 2-ton iron core. Some websites just did not come up at times - like google.com or msn.com. Both IE and Firefox exhibited the same behaviour.

Add to frustration the machines with Windows XP and Linux ran just fine. After much research on the web the blame game continued on the cause. Possible suspects: the preloaded Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security because of phishing filters and double firewalls and IPv6 configuration conflicts. Turning them off including Vista's own security features did not help.

Though the problem looked like a typical DNS issues but I was not willing to accept reasoning as a cause for this. Two different machines with two different OSes on the same network were working just fine.

After two long nights, I decided to take the route to configure DNS server entries manually. I looked at the auto configuration DNS provided by the router and it included just the IP address of the gateway (or the router itself).

I decided to manually configure the DNS entries which were provided by ISP on the laptop itself and Voila !!! It started to working like a breeze.

So in summary -

Symptoms:
Slow Internet connection on Microsoft Vista (in my case Home Premium Edition).

Possible Cause in my case:
My wireless router was overloaded with DNS requests and could not service them all.

Additional causes
Multiple Phishing filters and firewalls.

Solution:
Check using ipconfig/all command on Vista command prompt to check the DNS server entry. If you only see an single entry for the wireless router, it is time to manually configure the DNS entries for the Wirless Card. You can do that by configuring the TCP/IP v4 settings.

I have additionally disabled the IPv6 support on the Wireless card and have the Norton Phishing filter off. They did not make any difference without the DSN entries.

This worked for me and hopefully, it should work for you as well.