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Device: HP laptop, Windows 11.

Laptop's onboard Wi-Fi hardware is non-functional. External USB dongle is used instead (ASUS USB-AC53 Wi-Fi).

From time to time Wi-Fi connectivity drops for web-browsers. Connection to the Wi-Fi AP is still established, but there is no internet access for programs that rely on DNS.

  • Web-browsers report DNS lookup problem.
  • ipconfig adapter/IP/gateway settings are OK
  • Pinging IP addresses directly works (i.e ping 8.8.8.8)
  • nslookup google.com fails with 2 seconds timeout.
  • Windows troubleshooter reports that DNS server cannot be reached by the device.

DNS lookup fails even when preferable DNS server's address is manually set to confirmed online DNS servers (i.e to 8.8.8.8). There is no VPN involved. This problem has been tracked to that particular laptop and OS, i.e the Wi-Fi dongle, AP router and ISP are all clear and cause no DNS issues on other devices.

Temporary working solution:

ipconfig /flushdns followed by a reboot solves the connectivity until the some time in the future.

This problem is very common and not exclusive to Windows 11. Yet all the common solutions (/flushdns, manually set DNS, etc) failed in this case. What may be the more uncommon causes for this behaviour?

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    the system IP isn't an auto-conf ip is it (169.254.x.y)? nothing in your host file, right? I suppose it might be worth checking your OS integrity and your Memory.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 4:02

0

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