I'm using Windows XP Pro on a Toshiba laptop. I have wireless Internet
card at home and a wired Internet connection at work (I pop the
wireless card out and
plug in the cable when I get to the office). I'm having a weird thing
happen
where when I open IE and type in a web address that I know should
respond quickly, IE just sits for a moment (1-2 seconds) before I get
any feedback that it's accessing the site (the "click" sound effect,
the windows logo starts waving, etc.).

Note that once it seems to actually be going out to the Internet to
get the site, it pops right up. Which is why I'm pretty sure the
problem is on "my end," not the remote site's server.

Someone suggested this is a weird name-server thing, like I might have
a name server misconfigured in my setup or something, that causes the
delay. I haven't got a clue what that means, how to check it or how to
fix it.

How can I kill this delay?

thanks,
Eric

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Request for Question Clarification by pwizard-ga on 30 Oct 2002 14:18 PST

Hello pnoeric,

Can you open Internet Explorer, go to Tools, then Internet Options. Go
to the tab labeled "Connections". Click on the LAN SETTINGS button (at
the bottom). Make sure that you don't have "Automatically detect
settings" checked and that you don't have the "Use a proxy server for
your LAN" checked (unless you need to use a proxy server while you are
at work). You should have no checkmarks on this page. If you do, try
clearing them and then saving by pressing OK. OK all the way back out.
Close and restart your browser. Does this make the problem any
better/worse?

If this doesn't seem to help, then yes, most likely you have a problem
with your DNS configuration. We'll need a little more information to
help:

1. Do you use a proxy server at the office?
2. Do you use a static ip address at home or at the office (an ip
address that is fixed and assigned to your PC) or do you use DHCP?
(dynamic address assigned by your ISP or network device).

Thanks!
-PWizard

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Clarification of Question by pnoeric-ga on 30 Oct 2002 15:39 PST

Thanks for the note. I did have a checkbox on 'Automatically Detect
Settings,' which I removed, then rebooted... doesn't seem to have made
any difference.

I don't use a proxy server nor have a static IP at either location
(home or work), they are both DHCP.

best
Eric

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Request for Question Clarification by pwizard-ga on 08 Nov 2002 08:32 PST

pnoeric,

Do you have any other web browsers installed on your system such as
Netscape or Opera? I'm curious to know if you see this same delay in
either of those applications like you do in IE. If you would like to
test the name resolution process, you can go to Command Prompt (under
Accessories) and then type:

PING YAHOO.COM

or

PING NETSCAPE.COM

...try different sites... maybe ones that you haven't visited before.
It should come back with an IP address for the name very quickly. If
it hesitates for several seconds before even returning the IP address,
you may indeed have a problem with your DNS resolution or TCP/IP
protocol. Note that we're not looking at the actual response time
coming back in the pings during this test, just the amount of time it
takes to return a physical address from the name you typed in. You can
help yourself judge this time by trying to ping a fake address like:

PING jfljfsufi9fy9.com 

... it will take a little bit and eventually timeout and say invalid
address.

I also notice that you say you actually pop out your wireless network
card and plug into your wired network while at the office. Haqve you
tried actually leaving the wireless card in there, just simply
disabling it via network properties? This might also lead to a
solution. Right-Click "My Network Places" then select Properties.
Right-Click the wireless connection and then select "Disable". This
will cause all of the traffic to only route to the wired connection.

Let me know the results of these tests. Thanks!

-PWizard

... and I also don't know how to fix that delay. 
In my case it comes up from time to time; after surfing through some
pages, bang, the delay again. It just happens once then, but at least
5-10 seconds! Then again a period of normal working, then again.

I don't have a clue!

We had a very similar thing here at work, and it turned out to be
something to do with popping network cards in and out (or rather
disabling them and re-enabling - sony VAIO with built-in LAN and
Wireless LAN)

This is what we did to fix it. Note that this comment assumes that you
log into a windows NT domain when you get to work

Windows XP allows you to log into the network or into the local
machine only. We fixed these problems plus others by creating a local
account with the same username and password as the domain account. Now
when the employee goes home she changes the "log in to" box to
"Laptop" (name of the machine) rather than "DOMAIN"

Then I logged in to the domain and set up the hardware for when she's
at work. I did this by disabling the wireless card, and configuring
the lan card as normal. then i logged out and logged into the local
machine, disabled the LAN and enabled the wireless card. then i set
the right hardware profile to be loaded at the right time (you can get
windows XP to ask which hardware profile to use on startup).

Now, when she comes into work she just tells the laptop she's at work
and it does the rest for her - and because windows can only *see* one
network card, it doesnt try and look for the other one to get a
connection to the internet - instant access.

Hope this helps, this is just the way I did it, although I didnt go
through all this to solve that one problem, there were other reasons
for the setup

James

Pnoeric-ga and Macphisto-ga, we can clearly see here that there are
many probable causes for the delay. I also have personally experienced
this thing and what I did was to clear everything regarding web
browsing -- cookies folder, history folder, and the temporary internet
folder. I then downloaded an anti-spyware program called "ad-aware",
ran it and deleted the detected remaining spyware programs. I then
rebooted my PC and I was off to fast net surfing again.

Thank you all for the responses. I've installed Netscape 7 and found
it to be fast, fast, fast... not only in the weird latency/response
time issue that I originally posted the message about (there's no
latency with NS) but also in general page rendering, etc. (Side note:
wow, talk about a massive improvement over Netscape 6.2. NS 7 is truly
amazing.)

This tells me my problem is more about Windows and networking than
about the browser code per se. Which is frustrating since that's
harder to debug :-) I tried Ad-Aware (it found nothing weird), and I
have emptied out my misc folders/caches, to no avail. I think it's
just overhead in Windows, or something. Which is weird, and annoying,
but now I can run NS 7 instead when I want to browse fast.

Soooo thanks all for the notes.

best
Eric