Yesterday, while at school, I downloaded and installed WAMP on my laptop, and this seems to have caused my computer to be unable to load any webpages.
Before I knew about WAMP, I was partway through setting up Windows IIS (I think), and I had enabled it in the "Turn Windows Features On or Off" menu. After installing WAMP, I fiddled a bit with the stuff in the toolbar menu, like starting/stopping services, installing Apache through the menu, etc. to get the icon to go green. Once it did I went to "localhost" in Chrome and was brought to some Microsoft welcome page that seemed to be related to their IIS service. Thinking this was not the page I should be seeing, I disabled IIS in the Windows Features menu, and restarted my computer. Upon trying to reopen the Chrome tabs I had, nothing loaded. The only thing that showed up was a page that said "This webpage is not available" with a message below in smaller text that said "ERR_NAME_RESOLUTION_FAILED".
I was able to ping servers (tried 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) through command prompt's "ping" command at multiple times yesterday. At one point while I was home, I power-cycled my modem. After this I was able to ping websites by name, such as google.com and facebook.com, and I was also able to load facebook's website in Chrome. I didn't try loading Google. This only lasted for about a minute, and the same ping command returned "Ping request could not find host xyz". Refreshing facebook at this point gave me the familiar "This webpage is not available" page.
Things I've tried so far:
- Turning IIS back on. Just did this now and for ~30 seconds I was able to load Facebook a couple times, and Reddit a couple times. Refreshed both pages again and got essentially text-only versions of each site with very little formatting and graphics, but as far as I could tell both pages still had the same content. Another refresh a minute or two later and it's back to the same error page.
- Windows Network Diagnostics troubleshooter. When I ran it yesterday, I got an error along the lines of "Your DNS server might be unavailable.", and when I run it now I get "Your broadband modem is experiencing connectivity issues". I'm able to load webpages just fine over WiFi on both my phone and my brother's laptop, so I'm skeptical that the modem could be the issue. This is compounded by the fact that I had the same issues on my school's internet yesterday.
- Manually assigning IPV4 to DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Did this yesterday in response to the first troubleshooter error message and nothing changed. Currently, I've set IPV4 back to automatically retrieving the DNS server address.
- Some commands in Admin Command Prompt, that didn't solve the problem:
- ipconfig/renew, release
- something winsock reset
- flushdns
- Uninstalling WAMP through the Windows "Uninstall a Program" page. Again no change.
System Specs:
Laptop: Samsung ATIV Book 8, NP880Z5E-X01U8
OS: Windows 8.1, 64-bit
WiFi Adapter: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235
Internet Provider: Verizon FiOS
I'd be happy to provide any more relevant specs upon request.
