A Dell Inspiron N4050 notebook with Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64 Operating System (OS) has no wired internet connection when using the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 9 browser to surf the internet. The Microsoft IE 9 always shown a Bing page with various links. For example, if we want to connect to "www.google.com", it will shown a Bing page with various Google related links, but it will not directly connect and shown the "www.google.com" page.
The Dell Inspiron N4050 notebook devices, settings, etc as shown below are working fine:
- Built-in network adapter device is working fine in the Device Manager, although there is no LED light shown at the network adapter device.
- Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cable and network port are working fine.
- Did not specify any proxy servers in the Microsoft IE 9 browser proxy settings. Hence, it is working fine as we normally do not need to specify any proxy servers in the browser in order to surf the internet.
- Able to obtain IP address and has ping response from the Domain Name System (DNS) servers.
During checking, I noticed that there is no public network access and it indicated that the firewall settings are managed by the Mcafee Security Center software which came pre-installed inside the Dell Inspiron N4050 notebook. As the Mcafee Security Center software trial period has expired, it was removed from the notebook. After that, the notebook was restarted and the internet surfing is working fine. Hence, an expired Mcafee Security Center caused the "no internet connection" error as it might had blocked the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) TCP and UDP port 80.
