Looking 4 Fix - Can't Access One Particular Website

since you seem to have decent anti-virus software already it might not hurt to run a quick malware etc scan with Malwarebytes... www.malwarebytes.com/ (click the 'free download'). NOTE: this thing seems to automatically give you a 14 day free trail of the premium but I would disable that crap after it's installed since you already got Norton AV and it's generally a bad idea to run two AV's at the same time. if I recall correctly once it's up and running go to 'Settings > Account Details' as I think you can convert it back to the basic free edition there. but basically... we are just trying to run a basic scan of your computer to check for any random junk that might be on it which that software is one of the most popular ones for general malware detection.

but then again downloading "68.6 MB (71,942,408 bytes)" on dial-up is going to take a while as you would do a MAXIMUM of 21.6MB per hour (@ 6KB/s download speed which is pretty much a best case scenario for dial-up) which means it's going to take about 3hr20min to download and might be 4 hours (@ 5KB/s download speed) or so.

hell, your better off downloading that file on your phone (assuming you got a smart phone) and transferring it into your computer that way.

but ill ask you this... are you pretty careful on what's installed on your computer in general? ; and if it's been years and years since you last clean installed Windows, chances are that would be a good idea in general. I realize that would be time consuming though but it's worth doing once in a while, especially if you got a bunch of junk loaded onto your computer over the years as  the clean install ensures everything is running as good as can be.



Damn!

if it's possible for you to get ANY DSL/Cable line (hell, pretty much anything else) it's going to be A LOT better than dial-up. but I kind of assume you already know this.

p.s. but ill give you credit as you got to have patience for sure using dial-up in today's world which will be that much worse than it was when I used it back in the day. just loading basic sites has to take a while, especially if you got any fairly graphics heavy ones it's got to come down to a crawl, especially during the initial load times. like in your case your browser cache probably makes a big difference for your graphics heavy loads since it can load up the stuff on the site that's the same fairly quickly from your browser cache which for dial-up has to be a noticeable difference.



Makes me wonder if it's something on their end, especially if your pretty sure your computer is in good running order.

I would not be surprised if it was some weird glitch on your ISP's end, which if that's the case, there ain't much you can do about it besides getting a different ISP.

or better yet, if you got another computer to test... that would almost for sure tell us where the problem lies. because if both computers have problems using your ISP, chances are it's the ISP where the problem lies. or if you take your computer to someone else house and Wikipedia works on your computer on their line, well then you know it's your ISP.

p.s. I doubt ports are causing the Wikipedia issue as Windows 7 etc should have no problems connecting to Wikipedia by default.