I have a Windows 8 desktop PC that is working fine with my network.  I can browse the Internet fine using all major browsers etc.  After upgrading to Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store I noticed that my wired networking was not working correctly.  The status of the network does not change (i.e. it doesn't change to Limited Connectivity) however browsing to sites in Chrome, IE or Firefox doesn't work as well as Windows 8.

IE11 gives me the error "This page can't be displayed, make sure the web address is correct" and other browsers give a similar error.  I normally have to refresh 2-3 times to get a new page to load, sometimes even more.  Everything works fine from a laptop connected at the same time so it isn't an network issue with my provider.

I thought this might be a driver issue with the two on-board Marvell wired network adapters.   I wasn't able to rollback the driver to older versions I found on the Internet.  I then purchased another network card, Intel Desktop gigabit and the issue still persists with that adapter.  I then tried a USB wireless adapter and the issue still persists using wifi with the wired adapters disabled.  I tried a new network cable and no luck either.  I also tried resetting the IP stack using the various netsh commands.

After that I thought I might try reset the Windows 8.1 PC, however that didn't work as I didn't have the restore image available as I upgraded from the Windows Store.  I then tried installing Windows 8.1 fresh using a ISO with my Windows 8 key using some of the recent guides that are available.  That all worked but it didn't fix the networking issues.

I re-installed Windows 8.0 and the networking is now fixed and back to working normal again.  I'd like to try again but I think I will have the same problems.  I can't imagine why this would be a driver issue as I tried 3 different network adapters and two installs of Windows 8.1.  Any ideas what would be the cause of the Windows 8.1 issue?

Was any network troubleshooting done?

Yes I reset my IP stack using:

ipconfig /flushdns
nbtstat -R
nbtstat -RR
netsh int ipv4 reset
netsh int ipv6 reset
netsh winsock reset

This didn't really help as the connection was still unstable.  Flushing the DNS did sometimes help but it wasn't consistent.

I'm thinking of setting up a dual boot with Windows 8.1 so I can continue troubleshooting.  Any idea on how I could troubleshoot the network further?

Am having the same problem..... :( all my browsers are OUT of SERVICE with this new WINDOWS 8.1.... is it possible to downgrade to the version 8.0 ????

It is too painful to continue to use 8.1 ;(

Regards,

me

I too am having this same exact issue after the upgrade.  I had no issues browsing to sites prior to the upgrade.  I too tried all the same resolution tricks to no avail. Also, no internet issues either as I can browse to sites just fine on all PCs on the network not running windows 8.1.

Seems like there is an underlying issue here with the new update.  Any one at MS found a cause\solution to this one yet?

• Edited by thepolarbear Tuesday, October 22, 2013 11:28 AM

I too am having this same exact issue after the upgrade.  I had no issues browsing to sites prior to the upgrade.  I too tried all the same resolution tricks to no avail. Also, no internet issues either as I can browse to sites just fine on all PCs on the network not running windows 8.1.

Seems like there is an underlying issue here with the new update.  Any one at MS found a cause\solution to this one yet?

• Edited by thepolarbear Tuesday, October 22, 2013 11:28 AM

I now have Windows 8.1 setup to dual boot on a separate drive and the issue is still persisting in Windows 8.1 only.  I would be happy to run any tests in Windows 8.1 and compare them to my Windows 8.0 installation.  Any suggestions Microsoft?

HI,

Since this issue only occurred in the your desktop PC, and many network adapters you tried, failed, thus I think maybe we should focus on the model of your desktop PC, I suggest you update the BIOS and chipset from the manufacture to improve the performance of win8.1.

Please also test this issue in safe mode with networking.

Please refer to:

Windows Startup Settings (including safe mode)

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-8/windows-startup-settings-including-safe-mode

Id like to share the following article with you:

Wired and wireless network problems

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows/network-connection-problem-help#network-problems=windows-81&v1h=win81tab1&v2h=win7tab1&v3h=winvistatab1&v4h=winxptab1

Regards,

Yolanda

I have had this issue and a workround is to disable Enhanced Data Protection in the advanced menu of IE11.

I don't believe this is the solution, but it helps when trying to find the answer because at least the internet can be accessed!

HI,

Since this issue only occurred in the your desktop PC, and many network adapters you tried, failed, thus I think maybe we should focus on the model of your desktop PC, I suggest you update the BIOS and chipset from the manufacture to improve the performance of win8.1.

Please also test this issue in safe mode with networking.

Please refer to:

Windows Startup Settings (including safe mode)

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-8/windows-startup-settings-including-safe-mode

Id like to share the following article with you:

Wired and wireless network problems

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows/network-connection-problem-help#network-problems=windows-81&v1h=win81tab1&v2h=win7tab1&v3h=winvistatab1&v4h=winxptab1

Regards,

Yolanda

Hi,

From the description, I doubt it might be a compatibility issue, please also contact Asus, check if they have some released drivers, or have some ideas about this issue.

http://www.asus.com/support

Regards,

Yolanda

Hi Luke,

It seems that it is a compatibility issue between win8.1 and some NIC, routers and modems, So
maybe we need to wait for some time, and it is also a good idea to contact the manufacture to see if they have some valuable information.

Regards,

Yolanda

I pretty much ignored all of the "it's not our fault" comments from Microsoft, and went with this fix:

(1) Open cmd.exe in administrator mode by doing this:

  => Navigate to C:\windows\system32\

  => Right click on "cmd.exe" and select "Run as Administrator"

(2) At the prompt type:  netsh winsock reset

(3) Reboot.

It might not work for you, but it worked for me and a lot of other people.

I pretty much ignored all of the "it's not our fault" comments from Microsoft, and went with this fix:

(1) Open cmd.exe in administrator mode by doing this:

  => Navigate to C:\windows\system32\

  => Right click on "cmd.exe" and select "Run as Administrator"

(2) At the prompt type:  netsh winsock reset

(3) Reboot.

It might not work for you, but it worked for me and a lot of other people.

• Proposed as answer by Jon Bonner Thursday, October 30, 2014 2:32 PM

I have the same issue after loading Windows 8.1 as well. I am using Asus P7P55D motherboard.

I have been running windows 7 for a few years with no problems.  I installed Windows 8 and no issues either. It is when I installed Windows 8.1 that the problem started.

I am surprised that Microsoft is not taking this problem on their hands;  really, "it is not my fault"  At time in life that is not an a proper answer.

I consider that Windows 8.1 to be a great product but to make many people waste time like this. I prefer to be programming than to be wasting my time looking for this type of solutions.   it is not acceptable for a company like Microsoft to let the problem lingering like this.  

Buy the way,  I have tried the "netsh winsock r".  It seem to have worked for a bit but the problem re-occurs. Does any one have another suggestion? 

The "netsh winsock reset" hint was good, but it didn't solved the Problem.

I tested two HP Elitebooks, the 8570w and the new 850 G1, both with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 and both with

two wlan Network Cards, Intel AC 7260 and Killer Wireless-N 1202. Under Windows 7 anything running fine, the Intel reaches ~ 12 MB/s and the Killer Card up to 18 MB/s.

Und Windows 8.1 only Problems, looking for Internet pages is ok, but if you want to Transfer from the Internet or between endpoint @ home Network, you Transfer and the Speed is going down to 5 KB/s. After a few seconds it rises to 4-8 MB/s and then it falls down back to 5 KB/s.

Hello,

I have been fighting this for a few days now.  The above answer WORKED for me.

Thank you very much!

• Proposed as answer by Syfactor Wednesday, June 11, 2014 10:13 PM

Well this hit me last night whilst I was in the middle of using FireFox and Thunderbird.

No network based services would work including a simple network explorer of my local Domain.

However I could ping most servers on the Internet (like www.google.com).

I tried all the normal trouble shooting things including resetting the WiFi adapter all with no success.

I shear frustration I did a system restore from the last major patch install and everything works fine again. I didn't try some of the steps above as I had no Internet access but this thread is printed out if it happens again I'll post here.

My 8.1 laptop has been working fine up to late last night when I got almost exactly the problems described above. I'm not convinced it's a DNS problem as ping and nslookup both worked. Also the "trouble shooting" built in tools could see no problem (I assume they use ping etc.).

Bad patch springs to mind, when I'm back home I'll go look and see what the latest patches have been "fixing".

Trevor

Thank you for the winsock reset solution, it worked for me after wrestling with internet issues, following upgrade to 8.1 at weekend.

I knew it couldn't be the router, everybody else who hadn't been daft enough to upgrade to 8.1 was fine, leaving the only difference being this upgrade.

not convinced it's a DNS problem as ping and nslookup both worked.

Possible reasons are protocol and timing.  E.g. ping uses ICMP; browsers use HTTP.  When aliases and redirects are involved, ping will not demonstrate those factors.  For aliases ping is strangely unaffected whereas IE especially often is.  (FWIW frequently by caching a complete lookup created by ping -n 1 -w 1 etc. I can work around the symptom.)  And redirects, which might be where the real problem is, won't happen.

 
FYI

Hi,

After trying to update, configure and roll back my Wifi adaptor, I tried to roll back my Realtek PCIe FE Mamily Controller in Devise Manager - and this in solved my network issues I had on my new Win 8.1.

1: Search on Device Manager and find the controller under network adapters.

2: Click the driver tab and see if you are able to roll back the driver to previous version.

Hope this solution make you smile again :o)

 Please press the Windows key and the letter S. This will open the  Search.


1. On the  Search field, please type Control Panel and open the Control Panel interface on the left panel.


1. On the Control Panel, please choose the Network and Sharing Center option. 




If you do not see the Network and Sharing Center on the list, you may need to click on Network and Internet first.



1. Please click on the Change Adapter Settings option on the left panel of the Network and Sharing Center window. This will open the Network Connections window.


1. Please right click on your active network connection and choose Properties.


1. On the Networking Tab, please highlight the option for Internet Protocol Version 4 on the list and click on the Properties button.


1. On the General tab of the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) Properties window, choose the option for Use the following DNS server addresses and set the Preferred DNS server as 8.8.8.8 and the Alternate DNS server as 8.8.4.4


1. Click on OK and Close.


1. After setting up the global DNS settings, please check if you can now open websites in Internet Explorer.
 . It worked for me it fixed IE and Chrome

I have a Windows 8 desktop PC that is working fine with my network.  I can browse the Internet fine using all major browsers etc.  After upgrading to Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store I noticed that my wired networking was not working correctly.  The status of the network does not change (i.e. it doesn't change to Limited Connectivity) however browsing to sites in Chrome, IE or Firefox doesn't work as well as Windows 8.

IE11 gives me the error "This page can't be displayed, make sure the web address is correct" and other browsers give a similar error.  I normally have to refresh 2-3 times to get a new page to load, sometimes even more.  Everything works fine from a laptop connected at the same time so it isn't an network issue with my provider.

I thought this might be a driver issue with the two on-board Marvell wired network adapters.   I wasn't able to rollback the driver to older versions I found on the Internet.  I then purchased another network card, Intel Desktop gigabit and the issue still persists with that adapter.  I then tried a USB wireless adapter and the issue still persists using wifi with the wired adapters disabled.  I tried a new network cable and no luck either.  I also tried resetting the IP stack using the various netsh commands.

After that I thought I might try reset the Windows 8.1 PC, however that didn't work as I didn't have the restore image available as I upgraded from the Windows Store.  I then tried installing Windows 8.1 fresh using a ISO with my Windows 8 key using some of the recent guides that are available.  That all worked but it didn't fix the networking issues.

I re-installed Windows 8.0 and the networking is now fixed and back to working normal again.  I'd like to try again but I think I will have the same problems.  I can't imagine why this would be a driver issue as I tried 3 different network adapters and two installs of Windows 8.1.  Any ideas what would be the cause of the Windows 8.1 issue?

I have the same problem as yours since the windows 8.1 came out.  I have new Dell XPS few months old. I changed three NIC cards but my problem is that if my computer stays on 24/7 and approx. after 24 hours DNS issues.  I try everything nothing works but if I restart everything works fine for next day or so....  This is so damn frustration OMG company like MS CAN"T see this!!!!! I have multiple other PCs running windows 7 with no such issues.... it's something with windows 8/8.1!!!

 if I restart everything works fine for next day or so....

 

Sounds like something worth diagnosing.  E.g. a common issue is a user's security program creating a proxy which gets plugged by being restricted to 2 connections at a time, whereas without such a bottleneck newer versions of IE allow many more concurrent connections.

I can contribute that this is happening for me as well on a clean install of Windows 8.1 from disc with a Gigabite GA-Z77X-UD3H Motherboard and its' on-board Atheros NIC. Same symptoms as originally reported by Luke R., rebooting fixes it for me but network access will not work until that happens. It seems to happen at random while I am using the machine, be it at night or in the middle of the day, not after waking from sleep or anything that might make sense like that.

Had the same problem almost exactly, and been struggling with it for a day and a half now. Last thing I did was Enabling ipv6 in the router settings and boot it (not sure why it was disabled in the first place), and then in the checkbox in the network connection properties ipv6 option i did uncheck - apply - check - apply. I couldn't get it to stay online for more than 5 minutes before, but now it's been stable for more than an hour. Time will tell whether it's fixed, but at least something changed.

Edit: 12 hours steady now and holding...

• Edited by Hirrball Thursday, April 24, 2014 8:24 PM

Hello, sorry if this is a little late but it may be worth checking your internet security options.

I have been suffering with the same issues as all of the members on here and have also gone to the lenghts of reinstalling windows 8 and then 8.1 etc.

I felt I should share this with you all as this is the only thing that has worked for me for the past week!!

After un-installing my internet security and activiating windows built in security (defender and firewall) all has been running smoothly without a single hickup!

It appears that the problem lays with a compatability issue between the windows 8.1 update and most internet security packages.

I have even gone to my internet security's website to download a 'compatible version' to which no avail and since reverting back to the standard microsoft security services all is well as I say this has been stable and all network drives continually showing up for over a week now.

Hopefully Microsoft will communicate with other software companies to employ a fix to this compatability issue.

Hope this helps, let me know what you think

It appears that the problem lays with a compatability issue between the windows 8.1 update and most internet security packages.

I saw this today on my Surface Pro 2 where I only have standard security.  The troubleshooters are pathetic.  The problem was that it had decided that my Wi-Fi adapter was not working.  The way I finally got it "working" was by opening the Network Sharing Center, clicking on Change Adapter Settings, clicking on the problem connection and then disabling and enabling the adapter.  Why couldn't the troubleshooters have figured that out?

• Proposed as answer by carbojam Friday, May 30, 2014 11:40 AM

 Please press the Windows key and the letter S. This will open the  Search.


1. On the  Search field, please type Control Panel and open the Control Panel interface on the left panel.


1. On the Control Panel, please choose the Network and Sharing Center option. 




If you do not see the Network and Sharing Center on the list, you may need to click on Network and Internet first.



1. Please click on the Change Adapter Settings option on the left panel of the Network and Sharing Center window. This will open the Network Connections window.


1. Please right click on your active network connection and choose Properties.


1. On the Networking Tab, please highlight the option for Internet Protocol Version 4 on the list and click on the Properties button.


1. On the General tab of the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) Properties window, choose the option for Use the following DNS server addresses and set the Preferred DNS server as 8.8.8.8 and the Alternate DNS server as 8.8.4.4


1. Click on OK and Close.


1. After setting up the global DNS settings, please check if you can now open websites in Internet Explorer.
 . It worked for me it fixed IE and Chrome

I hope I am just adding to the questions. I have noticed that there are webpages that I can't seem to get to load in win 8.1 and win 7 computers running on a network with IOS devices that are able to reach those sites? That's strange. I can get to the sites like wikipedia, IRS, safari, but on the windows computers which are a desktop, laptop and dell venue 11 pro. The desktop is using win 7 the other two are using 8.1 everything is updated, drivers, internet 11 on the 8.1's. I am using windows for the firewall and antivirus. I have tried to disable them, no difference. I have tried to uninstall all browsers and I have tried firefox on one. There is no difference in connecting to these sites. I have also tried to use the google DNS servers, no difference.

I have also noticed that recently the update wasn't working. Windows update was giving me error messages. I have fixed this with a service option. 

This is really bad. I don't understand why all the other pages load in a few seconds but a few don't load. they load on the iphones and ipads fine on the same network but the windows products are not working!

I pretty much ignored all of the "it's not our fault" comments from Microsoft, and went with this fix:

(1) Open cmd.exe in administrator mode by doing this:

  => Navigate to C:\windows\system32\

  => Right click on "cmd.exe" and select "Run as Administrator"

(2) At the prompt type:  netsh winsock reset

(3) Reboot.

It might not work for you, but it worked for me and a lot of other people.

I finally upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 on my home desktop, and ran into this same issue where desktop apps could not access the internet, but Metro apps could.

I just wanted to say a big THANK YOU because the "netsh winsock reset" fix resolved the issue for me.

I pretty much ignored all of the "it's not our fault" comments from Microsoft, and went with this fix:

(1) Open cmd.exe in administrator mode by doing this:

  => Navigate to C:\windows\system32\

  => Right click on "cmd.exe" and select "Run as Administrator"

(2) At the prompt type:  netsh winsock reset

(3) Reboot.

It might not work for you, but it worked for me and a lot of other people.

Was any network troubleshooting done?

Yes I reset my IP stack using:

ipconfig /flushdns
nbtstat -R
nbtstat -RR
netsh int ipv4 reset
netsh int ipv6 reset
netsh winsock reset

This didn't really help as the connection was still unstable.  Flushing the DNS did sometimes help but it wasn't consistent.

I'm thinking of setting up a dual boot with Windows 8.1 so I can continue troubleshooting.  Any idea on how I could troubleshoot the network further?

Thanks man! your solution worked for me like a charm!

I was hopeless after trying many other changes to recover from the exact same problem like all others in this page.

But finally your steps rock!

Thank you.