Issues connecting to Hotmail; Volume Overlay not displaying.

how's it going? I've just had my computer cleaned with Broni, and everything seems to be a-okay. However, I'm having a few other non-malware related issues that seem to be plaguing me, and I cannot figure out how to fix them for the life of me... Broni recommended I come here for help! 

1. I cannot seem to load up www.Hotmail.com on my laptop. I've tried it with FF and IE, with no dice. I can load it up and login perfectly fine on any other computer, but for some reason every time I try to go there on my laptop, it just times out... Any ideas?

2. Normally, when I press my Volume Up/Down keys, a semi-transparent overlay with a meter for the volume level appears, and it suddenly stopped working. I mean, the volume changes levels, it's just that the overlay no longer appears... Any ideas?

Thanks for the help!


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Can you ping hotmail.com ?

Also check your hosts file in Windows directory for any redirection.
 

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I can't ping Hotmail. When I try to, it times out with 100% packet loss. Also, how do I check out the hosts file? I've found two of them, strangely enough, one with 27 bytes and the other one with 824 bytes. But I have no clue what to do with them, or how to check them for redirects.

As for reinstalling my keyboard software... How would I go about that? I don't have the Win7 Installation disk with me, if that were needed, so how should I do this.

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There should be only one hosts file in the following location :

C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

Open it in Notepad & copy contents over here.
 

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Alright, well, I located the single file there, and it only contained one line:

127.0.0.1 localhost


I'm thinking that the second file I had located earlier must be related to something else, such as a game or something... But I do have an update. At my university, we have multiple wireless connections around campus, and in my dorm building, when I bypass the router and actually use an ethernet cable, I can connect to Hotmail and other places perfectly fine, as well as log into Steam. And then, when I connected to the wireless connection, my problems resumed, with the inability to connect to Hotmail.

That was yesterday.

Today, while connecting to the wireless connection in one of the other buildings on campus, I connected to Hotmail with no problems, and I logged into Steam as well... Perhaps for some reason my laptop is blocking certain ports for some reason when connecting to certain networks? I'm not an expert on this kind of stuff, so tell me what ya' think.

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Its not your laptop but your wifi router/access point that is blocking sites. Talk to the person who is in charge of networking on the campus, only he would be able to help you out. 
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I tried logging back onto hotmail once I got back into my dorm, and I couldn't log onto those pages anymore wirelessly, so it must be an issue on their end... The only thing that confuses me is that my roommate has no issues whatsoever when going to those sites...