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Best Utilities

By Deanna McElveen

In our neck of the woods, high-speed and reliable Internet connections can be a rare commodity.

It’s not uncommon to report Internet issues to your provider via the phone, only to have a tech show up while everything is running fine.

If this sounds familiar, then Bakidok’s PingStatus is the tool for you.

This free and portable utility monitors your Internet connection or local network connection through the use of network pings (more info).

Before we start a walk-through, grab a copy of the app from its OlderGeeks.com page. Fire up the downloaded PingStatus.exe file; if Windows pops up a warning, simply click the “Run” option to let the app load. (You know our downloads are safe.)

You now have the PingStatus main window open — but nothing is happening, yet. Start by looking for the grid of boxes at the top of the window, under the “Ping request information” header. These slots are where you create and save ping targets. Note that the upper-left box has a small dash (Figure 1). The utility’s author created a starting target — google.com — for us. It’s a fast and reliable target for testing Internet connections. If PingStatus records lost packets or failures, they’re most likely caused by your connection, not Google’s.

Figure 1. The grid in the upper part of the PingStatus window is where you keep targeted IP addresses.

Once you’ve entered a URL or IP address, simply click either play icon to start monitoring.

As shown in Figure 2, my connection to Google seems pretty good! The different ping levels are color-coded, and their respective speed thresholds are shown in the lower-right corner of the PingStatus window. The lower the ms (milliseconds) number, the faster the ping packet traveled to google.com and back.

Figure 2. The default ping target is Google. Oddly, the app has two play and two pause icons.

You can tweak the Ping levels settings to suit your needs. If everything is red, and you already know your connection is horrible, you might want to increase these numbers to get a better sense of a connection’s stability. If your connection is stupid fast, then lower the numbers for a more detailed analysis.

After you’ve let the monitoring run for a bit, look under Detailed stats for the number of lost packets (Figure 3). Below those stats are your overall speed maximums, minimums, and averages. In this case, PingStatus recorded a maximum ping speed of 135ms. But the average is only around 30ms, so I’m not concerned. If the graph shows a high number of spikes, or the stats show large numbers of lost packets, there are problems with your connection.

Figure 3. In this monitoring session, my connection to Google looks solid: no lost packets, relatively few spikes of slow pings, and low averages.

Let’s try another target. Click the pause symbol for the Google connection. (You could let it continue running.) Next, click an empty box at the top of PingStatus and, under Statistics, enter the target’s URL or IP address. For this example, I’m monitoring one of my security cameras (Figure 4). You can add any local address, such as another computer, a router, an access point, or some other device on your network.

Figure 4. Ping targets can be any IP address you have access to: remote or local.

What about my own website? Again, I simply click an empty box and enter the IP address or URL. We get pretty heavy traffic on the site in the mornings, so the ping is a little slower than normal (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Pinging OlderGeeks.com in the morning showed consistent but not exceptionally fast speeds.

If you’ve set up multiple connections, you can start or pause monitoring for each connection separately. Simply select the box for a specific connection (Figure 6) and click either the play or pause icons. (One small gripe: Both icons are shown simultaneously; you must check the Statistics table or the digits in the boxes to see whether a connection is being actively monitored.)

Figure 6. In this example, I’ve selected my security camera. I can pause it and continue monitoring the other two connections.

The program also lets you choose to monitor either received or lost packets — or both (the default). Keep Auto-scroll checked (Figure 7) to have PingStatus always display the latest stats. Click Clean table to clear recorded ping data for the selected connection.

Figure 7. Uncheck Auto-scroll if you want to examine a set of recorded stats but keep monitoring active. (It will not pause the graph.)

PingStatus options: Clicking the small gear opens the Options window for both specific connections and the app (Figure 8). To save a specific set of program settings and ping targets, check the box “Save the application settings … .”

Figure 8. PingStatus includes settings for both specific connections and the utility as a whole.

Other options include starting the PingStatus minimized, starting pinging as soon as the app is opened (a good idea if you add the program to Startup), and saving a log to the log.txt folder. (If you’re an ISP tech, tape a note to your forehead reminding you to enable logging. 😀)

You can also adjust the threshold for calling a connection a failure, set the maximum graph values, define the buffer size, and adjust the timeout settings for sent ping packets.

When you’re done changing settings, click the Accept button.

So that’s it! PingStatus is a simple but excellent network diagnostics tool. It’s definitely getting copied to my flash drive–based toolkit! Hope you find it useful, too.

Happy computing!

Deanna and Randy McElveen are celebrating over 20 years in the computer business, ten years running OlderGeeks.com, and more than 26 years of putting up with each other. Their computer store is in a small town in the Missouri Ozarks. Believing that happy customers are always the best advertisement, they hope to do it for another 20 years.

Best of the Lounge

A week ago, our own eponymous factotum emeritus and site namesake Woody Leonhard formally announced his retirement from AskWoody.com. As he stated, the site and newsletter he has captained for past 16 years will be left “in new but familiar, and highly capable, hands.” And those hands belong to none other than veteran contributor Susan Bradley.

In the Lounge, the news was met with shock — and an outpouring of thanks, congratulations, and best wishes from the legends of AskWoody members. Do you have a favorite story about Woody?

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