Blog From Cebu To The World

I Can’t Access Google

I have this problem that bugged me since last week. I can’t access Google. Is this one of those love-hate thingie that bloggers and internet-huggers have with Google? I love Google for gmail, blogspot and adsense. Of course there is the webmasters’ tools and the useful analytics. I once hated Google for taking away my PageRank, and for my very slow earnings. But this latest problem accessing Google puzzled not just me but our IT guy as well when I first referred it to him.

Browser Problem

It was Friday last week that I felt something weird happening to my laptop right after I visited a website for my resuscitated EC dropping. I closed all the tabs and restarted my Firefox. Slowly the browser opened but not my chosen homepage, which is Google. I clicked my toolbar and went to Yahoo! It worked fine. I opened my friend’s blog and it appeared fine too. I tried Google again but I could not access it. What in the world is happening here? And so I deleted my Firefox browser.

Saturday I attended Wordcamp Philippines. The free internet access at AIM building is quite comforting. I opened my laptop. But still, minus Google. I referred the problem to Lyle, the Filipino programmer, who was my seatmate at that time. A reboot was what he suggested. Not again, I replied. Later in the morning, I learned that Mozilla was one of the sponsors. I tried to restrain myself from opening my browser – which was IE. Remember, I deleted Firefox the night before because I thought it was the source of my predicament. I also had my virus scanner check my PC not just once but twice. A tracking cookie was detected but the antivirus software deleted it.

Sunday dawn, after arriving from the after-Wordcamp meetup with Buddy and the influenza bloggers, I opened my laptop. I scanned my PC again using Symantecs. Then I fell asleep.

Spyware, Spyware

I could not recall what appeared in my dream when I suddenly rose from bed and went straight to my laptop. I found an error sign in my screen. Not a key functioned so, despite being groggy and the slight headache, I just pushed the on/off button. I restarted. My desktop image changed and there was now a big warning sign saying my PC was infected. It was not Symantec, but another program which I could not remember installing. I began to panic. But to panic when you’re all alone is useless. So I called up our IT guy.

Later that afternoon, I went to the office to meet our IT guy and he installed some spybots and cleansed my computer. I also cleared my browser of cookies and other temporary internet files. I redownloaded Firefox and added Google chrome too. Everything went fine. Or so I thought.

Access Problem Continues

I can access Google through our company network and its proxy servers. But not when I use Smartbro. So why not make use of our company internet access instead? Nah, I’d be bringing my sleeping gears to the office by then.

I was busy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with meetings and work stuff. Busyness made me forget my access problem. I chanced upon another of our IT guy from HO but he had no idea how to solve it. Thursday, when I sneaked in late at a 5pm meeting, I was quite bored and all that, so I searched for the solution. Whoaah! In 5 minutes of searching, I found the solution. The spyware scanning, the clearing of cookies, etc… were all part of the suggested solution but it did not fully solved the access problem.

The Solution

For XP users like me, go to, C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and look for the hosts file. Open it with a notepad. If there are other entries other than 127.0.0.1, or when you see plenty of lines like, 127.0.0.1 google.com , 127.0.0.1 google.ca, etc… then you’re in trouble. I was surprised to see a foot-long list. I deleted all other lines and retained one 127.0.0.1 localhost. I also confirmed this process with another of our IT guy. He added that it might have been caused by that spyware which attacked my host file.

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Am I happy now? Of course! Not because I am able to access Google now, but because I found the solution right there in the internet itself. For a non-techie like me, this is quite an accomplishment. Now I can sit back and relax.

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Tags: Can't Access Google, Problem Accessing Google, Spyware   Posted in Internet