There are a number of difficult terms one may or may not have heard of when it comes to your computer. Unless you are really into computers, you probably have never even thought of ARP. For those who are completely lost, ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol. It is the standard method for finding a host’s hardware address when its network layer address is known. So basically if it is in an IPv4 or an Ethernet network environment, windows operating system uses ARP to translate IP address to Ethernet Mac addresses. The trouble is that Microsoft Windows ARP cache will occasionally become corrupt and need to be cleared and deleted so that the cache can be refreshed.
I know countless people have experienced the situation of having difficulties connecting to Internet. Some of the connection problems include connecting to different websites or web pages that time out or fail, thus making it impossible to surf or browse online. The error may be due to ARP cache corruption.
To confirm that it is indeed an ARP issue, clearing the ARP cache is a terrific idea. In order to do this, try to ping both the loop back address (127.0.0.1) and the local computer’s IP address. Then try any other IP address and loop back address, but not any other IP addresses. This is the typical symptom of ARP cache failure. So when clearing the ARP cache, connection problems should be eliminated.
Use the NetShell (netsh) command to clear, delete, or refresh the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) cache by covering the following steps. First click the Start button. Click on Run command and type in Cmd into the Run text box. Press Enter afterwards. (For those with Windows Vista, type Cmd in the Start Search and then press Control-Shift-Enter) In the Command Prompt window, type the following command: netsh interface ip delete arpcache then press Enter. When doing this process properly, one should be able to clear the ARP cache.
Owning a computer and not being able to go online is a terrible thing. Just as horrible is being online and not being able to go to different websites because either your Internet has timed out or there are random errors that keep popping up. One way to solve this problem is to clear the ARP cache. When following the above steps, you should know if that is the cause of your connection issues.
For more information on clearing the ARP cache read How do I clear the ARP cache
