Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Windows 7 Honeymoon is Over

About a month ago I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 7 from my aging Windows XP. It was about time to do a fresh install of Windows to clean up the cruft, and I had heard somewhat positive things about it from friends. And by "somewhat positive things" I mean things along the lines of "It doesn't suck nearly as much as Windows Vista did!"

I was happy with Windows 7 for a few weeks, but I've started to see some odd DNS issues. DNS resolution seems to be really slow, and often fails. I'd say about 1-2 out of 5 web page requests fail to load due to DNS resolution failure. Then I click reload once or twice, and suddenly it gets the IP address and works.

I first mistakenly attributed it to Time Warner's DNS servers which aren't always the best. But trying GoogleDNS and OpenDNS didn't seem to alleviate the problem.

Tonight I came home and putzed around on my (OS X) laptop for a while. I loaded a number web sites without issue. But as soon as I hopped onto my Windows 7 workstation the DNS issues were back. It seems to *only* affect this machine.

Apparently many other people are having similar issues when using a wide variety of hardware. I've now spent hours trying to debug the issue and am no closer to a solution.

It's not the network layer -- I can pingflood other machines on my network and not lose a single packet. I tried disabling all network protocols but IPv4, and that doesn't seem to change anything. I'm getting pretty close to wiping Windows 7 from my drive and reinstalling XP.

Sooo, if you were thinking of upgrading, maybe wait for another service pack or 3.

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