Internet says it's connected but isn't connecting to most sites

Hi,

Ok, so I have an HP Pavilion g series laptop, my internet service is HughesNet, and I use Netgear. My home's internet says it's connected to my internet, but whenever I try to connect to a website, it's very slow and doesn't work for most websites. But it still connects to some websites, like I tried yahoo.com, imdb.com, hulu, craigslist and it connected to those sites, but it was sort of slow. But when I try to connect to google, facebook, tumblr, hotmail, or vertical response for my work (if any of you know what that is, it's an e-mail marketing thing) and it will not load. Or sometimes for certain sites, like vertical response, it will slowly load a page but as soon as I enter my login info, it won't connect.

I cannot for the life of me figure this out. I've googled people with the same problems and I've tried some of the things people have suggested. I've tried resetting the internet and turning it off for 5-10 minutes, I did an AVG scan and CC Cleaner, and nothing has changed. I dunno if it a cookie problem, or a proxy thing, or if I need to use winsock, I read something about a DNS thing, and I don't know what any of that means, so if you think that is a problem, please explain. I tried using the command prompt, and it says "media disconnect" when I do ipconfig, so I'm not sure if that is a problem. And when I ping some sites, I get the 4 responses, but for vertical response and google, which I need for my work, it always says connection timed out. I will try more sites to see what else will work or not when I get back home, I'm currently somewhere else using internet, so I can't check right now.

I called HughesNet yesterday, because the status kept changing from green to yellow, and yellow means not bad, but not great either. But the guy said he wasn't sure if the hughes net internet is the problem, he said it might be a router issue, but he wasn't actually sure. And I don't know if maybe I should try connecting an ethernet cable directly to my computer from the router, but I'll try that later, unless I'm suggested not to. I don't know if it's a virus, an internet issue, a modem/router issue, or maybe an IP address thing? Please help! this is incredibly complicated and frustrating. And I'm not that great when it comes to figuring out computer problems, so please explain it to me very clearly.

Thanks