I previously had a lot of domains blocked using my HOSTS file, but after a reboot it took several minutes for DNS to begin resolving to anything. So I disabled DNS caching as I saw recommended online.
This all became too much of a hassle and I have reverted my HOSTS file back to be much simpler. Now every web/DNS request seems to take much longer than it should, nothing is being cached. Running the command net start dnscache
or net stop dnscache
results in
The service is starting or stopping. Please try again later.
Investigating further, the DNS Client service in Windows has a "Starting" status and is not changing.
System Configuration (MSConfig
) shows "Start Pending"
What do I need to do to get this back to a working state again? Web browsing works but it is slower than usual. Other devices on my same network behave normally so I know it's an issue with this machine (windows 11 Home)
EDIT to show the dependencies for the DNS Client service
Microsoft > Windows > DNS Client Events
shows 0 events. I have now cleared out the application & system events and rebooted again (is that what you meant by "reboot to this state"?) - no changes