My net connection has not been perfect since I got it 8 months ago. Basically I have been unable to share it with my computers. It's not a big deal but it's a pain when I want to upgrade some software on one computer because I either have to move wires all over the place or find a way to download the upgrades which is getting harder and harder as more software goes to built in upgrading.

Anyway, I now that I have a new machine it's more important than ever that I get it working. It kind of worked, e−mail worked, but the strange thing was I could only get to some websites. For example I could view greggman.com, danchan.com, slashdot.org and google.com but I could not view dpreview.com, daypop.com or sony.co.jp.

Well, I found a site run by a guy that seemed to know what he was doing and after reading through his FAQ and not seeing the answer I sent him an e−mail in the hope he would have time to answer.

He answered almost immediately and now it works. It had something to do with setting the MTU of my machine.

MTU = Maxiumum Transimission Unit and although I really don't know the details this is my guess. When two computers talk over the internet they have to agree what's the largest piece of data they can send at once. Usually this works but in my case I have to run some special software in order to connect to my ISP and that software has a different (smaller) limit than the default for Windows. So, I'm guessing, what happens is that my machine and the other machine on the net agree for example that they will send upto 1500 bytes at a time but this middle machine, running that specialsoftware has a limit of 1454 bytes and when it gets a packet of data larger than that it just sends an error back the effect of which is I can't see sites that send packets that big.

So, if I dig down in the bowels of Windows I can tell it to use a smaller size which I did according to this site and now it seems to work. I'll cross my fingers that was it.