Problems with internet connection, ideas required.

Hi all,

A few weeks ago I looked at a friends laptop because he was having problems connecting to the internet.

It was a weird one, the laptop connected fine to both his and my wireless networks (tried it on both) but neither internet explorer or firefox would display any pages, was just getting the page cannot be displayed error.

I checked all the usual suspects, such as making sure work offline wasn't ticked and that is wasnt configured to use a proxy etc but couldn't find any reason why it wouldnt work so in the end I did a system restore and rolled windows 7 back a couple of weeks and that seemed to cure the problem.

A few weeks on now and pretty much the same problem is occuring. I've got the laptop back in my possession and the laptop picks up the wireless network fine and connects fine with full signal strength.

The internet will work using internet explorer, but won't even entertain opening a page on either firefox or google chrome, just getting the page cannot be displayed error again.

Also, if I try to install any programs that require files downloading from a server, such as spybot or spyware terminator, it fails to connect to their server.

It also won't update any programs that require the internet to connect to a third party server.

I have performed a virus check and a spyware/adware scan and found nothing significant, just tracking cookies which ive cleared.

Anybody had this problem before or have any ideas what could be causing the problem?

Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided.

Andy