Question : tool for troubleshooting browser connections

hello!

a couple of times a day, really annoyingly, my browser stops displaying webpages, Firefox just says "Server not found", and refresh does not help straight away generally, sometimes helps in a minute, sometimes in five. And then can go again.

Could you suggest any kind of network connection troubleshooting tool that i could use to locate the source of the problem? Ideally i would type in www.google.com and the tool would tell me whether it might be a DNS problem, or too many simultaneous connections, or whatever, or the tool would show me step by step how far the connection process got? Does Firefox have any built in troubleshooting or an add-on, or any stand-alone soft?

thanks.

p.s. i have Vista SP2.

Answer : tool for troubleshooting browser connections

To troubleshoot something like that I would usually recommend d3tr from (www.d3tr.de).  You can get a ping running to a server you know is good and see if it shows that your internet connection is down when your browser can't return a result.  The reason I prefer this to a simple ping is that you can see where the connection is failing.