ubuntu 6.06 LTS jumping offline, maybe timing out

in many situations click link and get "can't find server message." When the internet works it's quite good but this persistently recurring offline result never lets up. Sometimes if I reset the internet adsl with 'sudo pppoeconf' it will start strong, then it reverts to offline over and over. I should say it is intermittent. I may negotiate several links and then suddenly you can't go anywhere. Then later it works again. I've looked for fixes and found a couple. One of them is so complicated with four or five detail command line operations, of which more than half I have no idea what it is talking about. Another calls it a trick which consists of a command line entry with a website link in the middle of it. I don't know enough to even attempt it.