Comcast DNS solution...

I don't have all the OS's in front of me right now, but with Windows XP, right-click on My Network Places, and choose Properties. Find the network connection you're using, right-click on it, and choose Properties. Then choose Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and Properties. Choose Use the following DNS server addresses, don't put in any addresses, and press Advanced. Choose the DNS tab. Then press Add, and add the DNS servers you wish to use in the order you wish to use them.

I would suggest that someone who plays well with others will enter their ISP's DNS servers they'd get by DHCP as the first two, then some public servers after that. Note that you can put in a huge list if you want. Depending on your system, only 4 will show in the window, but there is a scroll bar there. I have 10 servers in my list right now. I'm reasonably sure that I'll never need that many, but you could enter even more if that's what you want.

And no third-party software needed.

As I recall, Windows 9x/ME only allows three or four servers entered manually, but that should be enough for most folks.

And this works even if you have a router. You don't need to make any changes to your router settings.

Warren, I had my DNS settings set that way before last nights Comcast failures. I use a static IP on my machine but use DHCP on others in the house. On my machine I had Comcasts two primary DNS servers(68.87.66.196 and xx.xx.64.196) set as #1 and #1 and added a third ORSC Public access Nameserver to the list. Didn't seem to help web browsing for me as far as I could notice. My web browsing went to a crawl and I start getting page not found and kept getting erros when checking mail using my smtp client. I also had these settings in my router and other computers in my home were affected the same way. I am wondering if I have done something wrong or if other issues are at play here. Since I did have another good DNS server in my search list, why didn't things keep on working? I am wondering but do the other DNS servers have to fail totally before "whatever" causes a correct nameserver to take over?

It's possible you might have been caching bad results. Right-click on the connection, and choose Repair, and see what happens after that. There will be a 2-second delay for each server that is down, so if your first and second servers are down, looking-up an uncached entry will take a blink over

If you want to see what's happening, bring up a command prompt, and type "nslookup

Thanks, it's a mute point now since last night when the issues popped I just changed my DNS servers and kept on chugging away. However I was just curious how things really worked with settings I thought would make a DNS failure like that experienced last night pretty much non existant from my point of view since I should have had a non affected DNS nameserver in my search list. When I changed my DNS servers I did run the repair(using WinXP Pro) You did point out some things for me to look at next time this occurs. I'm just trying to figure out all this works or is supposed to anyway! :-) Perhaps I need to run the repair each time I suspect DNS failures and allow my OS to cache a new DNS nameserver. I have applied a registry fix to disable negative DNS caches.

If you have more than one it typically takes 15 seconds per bad lookup (I think that's the standard client timeout) to work down the list. When this was setup most web pages had maybe one or two graphics and dialup was the norm for most everyone. Now for surfing you likely do 10 to 20 DNS lookups per page which can seem to take forever if you have to fail twice per lookup.