How to diagnose an internet connection that is not working

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• published: 16 Sep 2011
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Hi my name is Roger Ahuja and I'm going to take a few minutes and show you how to diagnose an internet connection that's broken and not working. So, the first thing we have to try to figure out is where the connection is broken and I'm going to use a Windows 7 box for this demonstration. I'm running Windows 7 64. So the first thing we're going to do is go to start and type in cmd and click on that and pull up a command prompt and in this command prompt, we're going to type in the words ipconfig. Now, what we are trying to do right now is to find out if your computer is talking to the router or not. If you get a media disconnected such as this right here or if we get for and ipv4 address, this is what we're looking at. If you get a 169 number in this area, that means you're usually not talking to the router at all and there's a connection problem between the router and the computer. It could be a bad router, but the two devices are not talking so the problem at this point is on your end. Now, let's assume that we do this test and we still don't have internet access. The next step would be to look at this default gateway here and what we're going to do is to ping that default gateway and I get a reply here so I am talking to the gateway which tells me that the router and my computer are talking fine. So, if you're getting an IP address and you're still not able to get on the internet, but you're able to ping the router, your router and the computer are talking fine. That part of the equation is okay. If you don't get a reply here, you can try resetting your router, if you're getting and IP address, but not a reply from the gateway, that's usually a router that's failing. You can try turning off your router and back on, that might fix the problem. Let's assume for a minute that you gotten this far but you're still not getting on the internet. So, now we're going to try to go ping a server that's actually located on the internet. So, we're going to ping 4.2.2.2. I am getting a reply here, if you were not getting a reply, but you were talking to the router then more than likely your internet connection itself is broken down. And at that point you would want to call your internet service provider or ISP. Let's assume for a minute this works and you open up Internet Explorer and you still can't surf the web. The next step will be to type in Ping www.yahoo.com. Now, again I'm getting a reply here. If you did not get a reply and again I'm assuming that in the prior where we pinged 4.2.2.2 you did get a reply, if you did not get a reply here, then that is a DNS issue. If you're in an office environment, you're going to want to talk to whoever is handling your servers or equipment. If you're in a home environment something is messed up in your computer at that point, because the DNS typically is handled by the computer in the home environment or it could be a setting in the router if you programmed it yourself because DNS can also be setup in the router. If you are able to ping here and you do get 4 replies, but you open up Internet Explorer and you still can't surf the Internet, then there's probably something wrong with Internet Explorer, you can try resetting it. I have a separate video that shows you how to reset Internet Explorer. If resetting Internet Explorer does not work, then you can look at your antivirus or firewall software because it may be blocking Internet Explorer from getting out. Because when you ping www.yahoo.com and you get a reply back, you're talking to the internet and that connection is working fine. That's basically it.