I want to make it clear that this post is a non-related content, but in a way relevant because it prevented me to update my site.
I encountered a peculiar problem with my laptop the past few days. It all began last Wednesday, Aug 15 when I had trouble logging in to blogger.com. Initially I thought it was the internet connection. I experienced interruptions before due to limited connectivity, resulting to slow loading of pages. Then I noticed that I can still access some sites like the pse website, facebook and yahoo mail. The sites I can't access included blogger as mentioned, my stockbroker's website and gmail.
Since I had to go to work that day and thinking the problem was temporary, I just posted a disclaimer in my facebook site to inform everyone that blogger.com is down. The minute I got home I checked my net again and found more sites I can't access, though I have good connections to some. I kept on getting the message: error 118 - your connection has timed out. Good thing I still have google to help me. The tips from the site I can access (for I can't also open some of my search results because of the same error) ranged from checking my firewall, checking my browser and refreshing my IP configuration, all of which I tried and checked.
I added the sites I can't access to the exceptions in my firewall. I even turned it off but the error was still there. Next I tried using internet explorer and Firefox. Same problem with limited sites I can access. I also refreshed my IP config (carefully following the steps I got) but still to no avail. This went on until Saturday until I discovered something - In Mozilla Firefox browser there is an icon on the leftmost part of the address bar where you can view the description of the site you're trying to access. For the sites I can't access I noticed it had XHTML type as opposed to the sites I can view, which has either text or html format. From what I understand XHTML is a newer version of coding, much like .docx is to .doc format in word files. I was sure that this was causing the problem so I dug in deeper to know what went wrong.
I found that there was a Security Settings Update Definition which ran a day before I encountered the problem. Thankfully I can access the Microsoft website to overwrite the auto-update to fix my internet problem. I never really paid much attention to my computer settings as long as I can use the programs I needed. This served as a lesson for me to turn off any unwanted updates to avoid the hassle of trying to fix it in the future. I hope you don't encounter the same problem too.