So, when I take my laptop from Home to work, to the airport, to some random cyber cafe I should have to manually alter my DNS servers assuming I can find someone in the location who can tell me what they are ?? Or let me guess, I should hardcode some public DNS servers which I can hopefully reach from where I am, hopefully is not down or having issues and hopefully I don't have poor latency to?

You could always run your own recursive server on your laptop, instead of a stub, and remove your dependancy on anyone but the roots. *ducks* Regards, Tim.