Windows 7: Win7 Starter Sporadic Site Connection Issues

This is a strange one - got two laptops here, one running vista, the other is a new asus ee pc laptop running Windows 7 starter. (The totally stripped down starter edition...why this was even made as a product befuddles me, but on to the issue at hand...)

The vista laptop has zero issues. The 7 starter will randomly stop being able to connect to some websites, but it doesnt appear to be an outright connection issue - i.e. google will always come up, but my girl goes to go to facebook or hulu and half the time she'll get a page not found as if there was no internet connection. Vista laptop works fine on all the sites, even when one of them wont display on 7 - tested this as the same time a bunch of times over - some sites wont connect on 7, go over to the vista machine and the same sites come right up. (Which normally would point to the connection in some fashion, but google, yahoo...will come up with no problems.) Like bad hearing...it comes and it goes...



I disabled the power mgmt for the wireless nic but the behavior remains unchanged. Just wondering if anyone might have some suggestions.

thanks!!!

Any security software running on the machine?

Just the trend micro stuff that came with the pc....just looked through there, not much in the config util...

that's av though...nothing else other than windows defender, but it doesnt make sense that defender would randomly permit or deny...