OK! So if you’re having problems of “slow Internet”, Internet Explorer telling you in the bottom left that it’s “waiting for http://…” whatever website you’re viewing then this might be of use for you if you manage a Windows domain.
It’s a DNS problem. Are you on a domain? Are you behind a router or firewall? Do you have your own DNS server on a local domain?
For those of you who are on your own private network using a Windows Server for DNS what you need to do is this:
- Open your DNS management console
- You’ll see it says DNS > Your_Server, click on your server
- Right click “Forwarders” > Properties
- Under the “Forwarders” tab make sure the checkbox for “Use root hints if no forwarders available” and make sure you have your ISP’s DNS servers in your list.
- You might want to bump the “timeout” setting from 3 seconds to 1 or 2 (shouldn’t be a problem)
- Lastly on your servers IP settings (NIC, under IP4 if you have Server 2008), make sure that under your tcp / ip settings you specify ONLY 127.0.0.1 for your DNS server
Do not have any other servers listed because the above “Forwarders” takes care of forwarding any DNS queries your local server doesn’t know anything about. I read lot of stuff on the net when looking into this about the browser being the problem (and maybe it is for you) but for me it wasn’t the browser at all!!!
* By the way, Windows XP machines seemed to be unaffected by this and I’m not entirely sure why OTHER THAN they might be far more forgiving with a DNS misconfiguration, Windows 7 seems to be MUCH MORE sensitive to DNS than Windows XP.