You hold the proof in your hand: the site is up, because your phone is showing it. Yet your PC swears the name does not exist. Both are telling the truth about different DNS paths — this page lines the two paths up side by side and fixes the one that is lying.
This is the most argued-about shape of ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED: the phone works, the PC does not, and each side gets used as evidence that the other is broken. In fact the comparison is the diagnosis. Your phone and your PC almost never resolve names the same way. The phone may be on mobile data, using your carrier's DNS — a completely different service from your home network. Even on the same WiFi, modern Android applies its own Private DNS (encrypted DNS, often to Google's service) and Chrome on the phone adds its own resolver behaviour. Your PC, meanwhile, uses whatever DNS is written in its adapter settings — which may be a stale manual entry from years ago, a dead server from an old office, or the router on a bad day. Same house, same site, different phone books. The fix is to discover which phone book your PC is actually using and compare it with the one that works.
Before comparing, make sure the phone is really proving what you think. If the phone is on mobile data, it never touched your home network — it proves the website exists, nothing more. To test your network itself, put the phone on the same WiFi as the PC and load the site again.
Skipping this distinction is how people replace healthy routers. Two minutes of honest testing saves the purchase.
Run ipconfig /all and find the DNS Servers line under your active adapter. Interpret what you see:
Then ask both candidates directly: nslookup the failing name with no second argument (your configured path), then with 1.1.1.1 appended. If the public server answers and yours times out or refuses, you have caught the configured server in the act.
The repair happens in the adapter's IPv4 properties:
ncpa.cpl)ipconfig /flushdns, fully restart the browser, retestRepeat the same glance at the IPv6 properties if your network uses it; a forgotten manual entry hides there too. And check for a VPN client that is not connected but still owns the DNS settings — some leave their servers behind after disconnecting, sending every question to a tunnel that no longer exists.
If the PC's configured servers prove healthy and the name still fails only here, the remaining causes are all PC-local memory. The resolver cache can hold a negative answer for that name — one flush clears it. The hosts file can pin that single name to a dead address while DNS answers perfectly — the ping-versus-nslookup split exposes it, and its own guide in this series covers the cleanup. And Chrome can disagree with the whole PC through its secure DNS — if Edge opens the site on this same machine, the browser guide is your next stop.
Notice the pattern of this whole page: nothing here is repaired by replacing hardware or calling the provider. A phone-versus-PC split is almost always a settings fossil on the PC — an entry written once, by someone or something, and never revisited. Finding it is the fix.
Watch the video to see the comparison done live — the same name tested on the phone, in the browser and with nslookup until the guilty setting shows itself.
▶️ Watch Full VideoBecause they usually resolve names through different services. The phone may use mobile data or its own encrypted Private DNS, while the PC uses the DNS servers written in its adapter settings. If the PC's configured server is stale or dead, names fail on the PC alone.
Run ipconfig /all in Command Prompt and read the DNS Servers line under your active adapter. One entry matching your router is normal at home. Any address you do not recognise is a leftover worth removing or replacing.
Largely, yes. If the phone on the same WiFi resolves the name while the PC cannot, the router's forwarding works and the problem sits in the PC — its adapter DNS settings, its resolver cache, its hosts file, or Chrome's own secure DNS.