I service computers for locals - meaning mostly upgrading and optimizing. Yesterday, I sorted out a family desktop, with an external USB drive for backups and various other bits and bobs. They had two new laptops - absolutely identical, except the girl's was Pink and the boy's Blue. Both with Vista Home Premium - laptops exactly the same in all respects. Bought together, same supplier, same specification. Identical, except for the colour. Both easily connected to internet and both auto-updated Windoze with SP1, installed, rebooted, finished the install (Part 3) and then, as is the case with MS products and updates, did some more updates. Exactly the same on both laptops. So, you can see both were happily accessing the WiFi internet to do those auto-updates. The WiFi is set for Open (no encryption) as the family house is at least a quarter of a mile away from any other house, so they opted to leave it "Public" so when family or friends visited, the internet was available without need for any passwords. Due location, no need for any passwords or suchlike. Now - sort this out - I can't. The girl's laptop can access the internet websites immediately, if not sooner. The boy's cannot - just gets a message webpage not available. Both using IE8. I have had the two laptops side by side and spent about 1½ hours going through all settings (WiFi, IP address, DNS and so forth) and can assure anyone the two laptops have identical settings for everything relating to their WiFi connection and their IE8 security and other settings. Absolutely identical. They should have been, of course but went through every possible setting to ensure was so. There' a pile of sawdust on my desk from overscratching my head over this. It does not seem possible for it to happen - yet it has and I cannot see any way to resolve it - well, not on the face of things. I am planning to format Drive C and run a disc clean programme from a CD to totally wipe the drive, to kill any potential MBR problems - then use the DVD I have made from the Restore Partition to re-establish the computer as bought. However, I have a day to spare, so thought worth posting this in the feint hope someone may have a solution that I honestly cannot envisage. It just seems to be totally impossible. It is not possible to install another browser, like say Opera - I have tried that as I have the downloaded files BUT during the installation of such as Opera (as one example) the install needs to access the host website - and that just cannot be done, so no install possible. There you go. A computer that is connected to the internet (must be as upgraded Windoze) but cannot, for some apparently unfathomable reason, let a browser do the same. BTW - using any of the Network etc. repair facilities just brings up a box stating Windoze cannot repair - see the Administrator. As all settings are identical - what the heck! Brings to mind (a slight adjusted) old saying: "All laptops are born equal but some are more equal than others"