How do you clear the DNS cache in Windows?

Flushing the DNS cache on Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition

• How do I flush the DNS Cache on Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition

• Answer:

  stevehk-ga: Windows 98 SE does not provide support for manually flushing the DNS cache. This capability is inherent to the NT-based operating systems such as Windows 2000 and XP (the 'ipconfig /flushdns' command you may be familiar with). In Windows 98 SE, the only simple manual method to flushing the DNS cache is to perform a reboot (shut down the computer completely, then restart it). In Windows 98 SE, the DNS cache uses a timeout setting stored in the Registry to determine whether it is necessary to reconfirm an address resolution. If you refer to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base Article, 263558, you will learn more about this: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;263558 From this article, you will see that, prior to Internet Explorer 4.0, the DNS cache timeout was set to 24 hours. From IE4.0 onwards, this value should now be automatically set to 30 minutes (ie. 1800 seconds). If you are adventurous enough to play around in your system's Registry, you can achieve a DNS cache flush by setting this Registry setting to a very low value, such as 1 (for 1 second). Start up Internet Explorer, and enter the URL that you want to get to. This will cause a new query to be made for the DNS entry of the domain in question. Then, set the Registry value back to a higher value such as 1800. Please note that you do not want to have the DNS cache timeout set too low on a normal basis, as this will slow down your online experience due to the constant requests for DNS resolution that your PC will need to make. To summarize, you can flush your DNS cache in Windows 98 SE by rebooting, or by playing around with the Registry settings using the information in the MS KB Article linked above. Hope this helps! aht-ga Google Answers Researcher