Can you ping the websites when that happens? Or can you even ping your router's IP address?
mk so here's some results. I dinked on imgur until it did the page freeze thing again and ran a ping while it was frozen. The command I'm using is "ping -r 1 <ping target>"
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"Ping request could not find www.imgur.com"
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When I tried a ping maybe 30 seconds before that:
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Playing of cf-ssl11496-protected-www.imgur.com [103.31.6.33] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=30ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=32ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=31ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=30ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Ping statistics for 103.31.6.33:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0
Approximate Round Trip Times:
Min: 30ms, Max: 32, Avg: 30ms
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Then, as soon as the page timed out and it gave the "webpage unavailable" error, I hit refresh and with a very slit delay the page displayed properly. Only this time I ran a ping and got some packet loss:
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Playing of cf-ssl11496-protected-www.imgur.com [103.31.6.33] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=
133ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Reply from <above IP>: bytes=32 time=
267ms TIL=56
-Route: 76.28.136.151
Ping statistics for 103.31.6.33:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 4,
Lost = 2 <50% loss>
Approximate Round Trip Times:
Min: 133ms, Max: 267, Avg: 200ms
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I've run around 10 pings to 76.28.136.151 and get the same 3 varied results: 1) Rare get full packet return and pings around 30ms. 2) Request times out completely. 3) Mixed time out and packet loss of almost always 50% with pings over 300-500ms.
So the weirder thing (maybe just to me since I don't know much) is that when I run "ipconfig" to get my router IP (i.e. "Default Gateway") I am presented with a "Default Gateway" with mixed letters and numbers, instead of what I expected as a standard ###.###.#.# format. Then when I check it from my wife's computer, it shows that address the same except for 1 of the digits. When I try to ping the mixed number-letter gateway I get:
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PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
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Strangely, I get this same response every time, using the default gateway shown for both my wife's and my system using both computers.
Hope that infor was presented in a palatable way and gives you something to work on. :/ I've run 3 different spy scanner, 2 registry cleaners/scanners, and a virus scanner and they all come up dry, so I'm inclined to think it's a hardware issue. But I don't know that if my wireless card was "dying" what that would even look like or how that happens - or why, for a machine that is barely a year old.
Cheers mate. Thanks.