a friend asks "How can I get on yahoo? It wont open up."?

Question

I am trying again to help a friend of mine. She is telling me that she cannot get on yahoo at all on her computer. I hope someone out there can help. It's not her home page or anything like that, it's just that when she goes to www.yahoo.com the browser says 'page not found"

Answer 1

try to narrow down the problem

can she go to other websites?
try using another browswer on her computer to go to yahoo.
try re-installing the browswer.
try clearing out all the cache and cookies.

there are lots of things to try, but the information you have given is not sufficient to diagnose the problem, tell your friend to contact me if she needs help.

anything else i said previously was not meant to be rude, only funny, sorry if i offended you or her.

Answer 2

I would diagnose as follows.

1) Can you use the web browser to go to other sites? cnn.com, for instance?
If not -- a) Does the computer have a valid IP address? (Start | Run | cmd | ipconfig
b) Is the cable conencted from the cable modem, or DSL modem, or router, to the PC. Do you have link lights on one or both?

If yes, then perhaps you have spyware.
Check the hosts file to be sure that there is nothing in it redirecting yahoo.com
Run spybot and adaware, and remove all adware/spyware. Be sure to update with latest dat files first.

Try with a different browser, firefox for instance.

If she can't get any of these downloaded, then you may have to download them for her, and burn them onto a CD.

An advanced tool you could use is "hijackthis". It is useful, powerful, but requires someone who knows what things are supposed to be there, and what things are not.

Good luck!