Clearing Windows DNS Resolver Cache
Occasionally, my cable modem from Time Warner decides it doesn’t wanna work. Actually, it happens a few times a day and I have to recycle the modem (unplug power, wait 30 seconds, plug back in) for it to find the connection again. It drives me insane because it likes to drop the connection exactly when I’m gonna do something mildly important. I’ve called TWC about getting another modem, but I gotta answer all these stupid questions from the support guys who pretend it’s my router or my fault somehow, and I’m just too lazy to drive across town to pick up another one. It wouldn’t be super bad, but once I’m back online, I can’t connect to any sites that I attempted to go to while the connection was down because Windows XP keeps bad responses from websites in the DNS Resolver Cache for 5 minutes. So here’s a fix for anyone else experiencing the same problems.
Open a command prompt by clicking the “Start” button, then click “Run…“. In the command prompt, type this:
ipconfig /flushdns
and press Enter. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t like the command prompt, you can go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services then click DNS Client and restart it.
I googled DNS Cache after writing this post and found this page that has more information, along with a Registry Tweak to keep WinXP from caching negative responses: DNS Resolver Cache By Vic Laurie