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In Windows 2000 there is a service that keeps DNS information cached on your computer. This is good because the computer doesn’t always have to query the DNS server to locate web sites you’ve already visited. The problem is if you don’t restart your computer often enough and one of the DNS entries changes it doesn’t always get reflected in the DNS cache. A recent example is when a friend of mine changed his hosting service. Other computers showed the web site with no problem but my computer continued to show the old site. I fixed it by restarting but depending on what else is running on the computer it’s not always possible or desirable to restart to update or flush the DNS cache.

There’s no real danger with this tip. The worst thing that could happen is your DNS server may go down immediately after you flush the cache and you won’t be able to access any web sites until it comes back up. Not likely.

This is a simple procedure. Just open a DOS Window and type ipconfig /flushdns at the command prompt. All done.

Modified 2000-12-07