hi everyone. reposting here because it got cut off earlier.

i am having strange trouble with my wifi. This problem does not happen on windows 7 (this is a dual boot machine).

it is weird that i am able to ping websites but unfortunately my browser is misbehaving. it opens some websites, but doesn't open most (Chrome gives the error: CONNECTION_REFUSED.). However on entering the ip address of the website in the browser, it works for some sites. At the same time, dropbox is not working. Pidgin does not work and I cannot connect to IRC either. Several sites say that this is a problem with DNS, but i can ping my machine fine with my netbook. pinging also works okay for www.google.com but entering www.google.com in the browser does not open it. entering 74.125.237.179 (google ip address) works ok. I logged into my router (192.168.1.1) and rebooted it several times but nothing seems amiss, but the issue does not get resolved.