safari,itunes not connecting

have purchased a new mx18 laptop and enjoyed updating everything with no problem. upon installing itunes ready to sort my iphone and ipad out I noticed that the itunes store page would not load...hmmm! sometimes it would load after a very long wait and would be in plain txt. so i decided to try safari and this is also not loading onto webpages....is ie9 the problem? and looking online it seems a common problem