This is an old joke from my IBM days where "IBM" means "It's Better Manual". Recently Comcast had an internet outage where their internet was working...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/comcast-subscribers-suffer-another-internet-outage/?news=123
...but their DNS (domain name servers) were down. The internet operates on IP addresses, for example 209.85.225.99, and DNS translates these to website names, such as www.google.com. With the DNS down, all of your Favorites/Bookmark website names could not be translated to IP addresses, and you'd get a message: "Internet Explorer cannot find the webpage".
Your Router usually gets a DNS address automatically along with your IP address. On both the router and the PC's DNS settings, change the DNS checkbox from automatic to manual. Use the big DNS server from Google®: 8.8.8.8. For your second choice, another good DNS is from Level 3 Communications®: 4.2.2.2. For a laptop, make sure you change the DNS settings for BOTH wired and wireless -- they're independent of each other.
Manually setting the DNS on the PC (both wired and wirelessly) also protects you against "DNS poisoning" where a virus on one PC used a router's default ID/pw to change the DNS. The remaining PCs on 'automatic DNS' became "sitting ducks" because the automatic poisoned DNS would not allow critical/security updates and virus signature updates for security software.
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