I keep getting "cannot be displayed", newb needs help here

[Drew Man]

Well first off I'm more of a car guy, and the message boards I'm used to, I can search them in and out, but after searching here I get all kinds of stuff that I have no idea what I'm looking at. If my problem is out there already and has been solved, well I couldn't find it and I am sorry to have "re-openned the can of worms"
Okay my problem is as follows. On my labtop, with xp home, I type where I want to go in the browser, hit enter, the little bar that shows that your browser is working doesn't even light up it goes straight to a "cannot be displayed" page. So I hit the refresh button, ever once in a while it takes the first try, but more times than not you have to hit refresh at least 3 times, and I have even counted up to 18 times before it finally goes to that site. I mean heck it's bad enough I have dial up, but having to do that the rest of my life, no way.
Some history is as follows, I got the laptop last thanksgiving from my local best buy, so it's not even a year old. The main reason for having it is to get online while I'm out and about, not asking for much as I use it only about twice a week, and that's to get online just to see stuff on ebay, or autotrader and what not. I have done the spybot s&d thing and no dice. This problem slowly came upon me, so I can't tell when it first started, at first it was about 1 in 5 times I'd go to a site, refresh once and it would open, no big deal. I deleted all the temp files and cookies and all that stuff and it's the same thing. Now it's to the point that every site I want to go to will not open, no matter what site I want to go to, hit refresh a bunch of times and finally kinda opens the site. I say kinda because some of the things on the sites don't show up, they have the red x. What the heck do I do, what could the problem be? Thanks, -Drew

[andyms18a]

hi drew man
welcome to PC mec
first you may get better results if you post this in the internet forum http://forum.pcmech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6 but to start you off try
flushing the dns cache as shown on this site http://www.updatexp.com/dns-windows-xp.html then open IE go to tools internet options advanced and hit the reset to default all so do the same with security and see if that helps