h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I started having connectivity problems a few weeks ago. Pages would take a long page to load or not load at all for five or ten minutes at a time, then all returned to normal. Thing is, it only affected certain websites, and yes, this was one of them. At first I thought it might be the browser - I've got so many anti malware, anti script, anti cookie, anti tracking add-ons that some pages lock up the browser two or three times before loading, and some sites I can only use with Chrome now, which sort of defeats the purpose really.

It gradually got worse until, on Saturday, I was connected maybe 50% of the time, I couldn't load pages, I couldn't stream radio, so I called the ISP and we did a traceroute. That showed up a problem which they said they'd get one of their technicians to look at... on Thursday Earliest appointment they have

It seemed yesterday as if the problem had been fixed - everything was running smoothly, but it came back this afternoon. I did another traceroute, firstly to google.com - every attempt timed out. And yet I was still laoding web pages and streaming radio. So I tried it with yahoo.com - smooth as silk. Tried google.com again - all timeouts. Then I tried microsoft.com - no problems with the first 10 attempts, then all timeouts. Google's still timing out.

Here's the thing though. I'm currently logged on in Chrome because I can't get h2g2 on Firefox. I can't get Wikipedia on Chrome but it loads without a problem on Firefox. And I'm streaming the local NPR station on Firefox with no dropouts or buffering.

So I guess I'll restart the PC and see what happens. Watch this space.

And here were are, back in Firefox And Wikipedia is working again on Chrome

And yes, I did try clearing the cache earlier on. I also went to web pages (BBC radio) I haven't previously visited, which all loaded.

I'm not a but it always mystifies me why things that work one day - or even one hour - do not work the next, even though nothing could possibly have changed.

E.g. I can take a screen shot, perhaps to paste it into an e-mail, for the first couple of hours of the day, and after that I have to re-boot to be able to do it.

Nothing to do with your problem, but hey ho.

So will we ever find out if it's your fault, the fault of your provider or the fault of the sites that aren't loading? Or some gremlins somewhere else along the line?

Perhaps on Thursday when the techie shows up. I'll mention what happened yesterday afternoon and see what's to be made of that. The bloke I spoke to on the phone on Saturday was insistent it was them and not my PC, but it could be a little of both.