Windows 7: DNS Issues, what a pain...

I recently installed a clean copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bits on my HP dv2845se laptop and I have DNS issues.
Before, I was using XP and I had no DNS issues at all.

The culprit seems to be my old router which is a Speedstream 5660.

Why do I say that? Because when my wife bought a laptop with Vista some time ago, she also had DNS issues, until I fixed everything
by disabling all these settings:

TCP Global Parameters
---------------------------------------------
Receive-Side Scaling State : disabled
Chimney Offload State : disabled
NetDMA State : disabled
Direct Cache Acess (DCA) : disabled
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : disabled
Add-On Congestion Control Provider : none
ECN Capability : disabled
RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

Now, I also disabled all the settings on my laptop but I still have DNS issues.

As a test, I installed the network driver for Windows Vista but no luck.

As a test, I disabled the 'DNS Client' service but no luck.

As a test, I unchecked all the IPv6 from all the adapters but no luck.



I am using a fixed IP address and a fixed DNS address.


I am out of ideas. Anybody? I know I will probably have to buy a new router but in the mean time I am trying to fix the issue.

Thanks

Are you using your ISP's DNS servers? If so you could try manually entering the DNS server address to a publicly available alternative

Open DNS is free and available as follows

Primary: 208.67.222.222
Secondary: 208.67.220.220

Set these manually into the network setup for you PC and see if you get any improvement.

They may also be manually entered into the actual router as long as the router will allow this

The successful use of OpenDNS depends on the OP's ISP. In an attempt to assist two friends I learned that two ISPs in my area specifically block OpenDNS and prevent their customers from using OpenDNS. Time Warner Road Runner and Windstream are the two upstate NY (USA) companies that do this. On the other hand Verizon FiOS (my ISP) does not prevent their customers from using OpenDNS.

There is a tool put out by Steve Gibson of GRC that will analyze local and popular remote DNS servers to give the user a listing of the optimal servers accessible from their location: DNS Benchmark

OP: What are your exact DNS issues?

Ok thanks. I will try these OpenDNSs but I doubt it will do any good, since the request has to go through my router anyway.

In fact, I am trying to find out, if there is any other network settings that was added in Windows 7, that was not in windows Vista.

Would be good to have a list of services that uses IPv6 in Windows 7.

The main user of the IPv6 system in Windows 7 is HomeGroups, As far as I know that is the only reliant subsystem at this time.

After a lot of f.... around nothing was better.

I took my SpeedStream, changed it to 'Bridged' mode, and used a Linksys router to do the routing and perform the PPPoE session and voila. Everything is back to normal and very fast.