Test communication with remote computer and check its online status over the Internet with free visual Ping tool for Windows.
What did your mom do when you got sick as a kid? Most probably the first thing she did was giving you a thermometer to check your body heat. If you are trying to access a remote computer and are not getting a response, chances are that computer is not functioning properly. In other words, it might be sick. But how would you give a thermometer to that PC?
There is a free tool called ping.exe that comes with most versions of Windows. You can use this tool to poke the remote PC and check its response. To use ping.exe, you would typically invoke a command line, which would open a black console window, and type ping.exe followed with IP address of the computer you want to check. Usually you would get a response right in the console window in a matter of seconds. You would judge - or, rather, guess, - the remote computer's health by the cryptic numbers printed as decimal integers. If the remote computer is not available, or if the network is not available, or if some link or a piece of hardware in between you and the remote PC has failed, you'll get nothing. It is up to you to guess what and where have failed.
SI Ping designed by Software Institute http://www.softinstitute.com/, on the other hand, gives clearly legible and well formatted output by providing easy to understand and well explained numbers. It displays all the vital information, such as time to access the remote computer, in milliseconds, and allows you to ping more than one computer by simply selecting their address from a combo box. Thanks to its user-friendly, convenient user interface, SI Ping is much more convenient to use than the Windows ping.exe, being a great free replacement for the old-fashioned console-based tool.
Software Institute releases well-designed, simple to use products that help computer users solve one particular problem. Our products are free, and typically perform just one task, such as ping, trace route, or lookup, but do it in a convenient manner. We offer a number of free networking tools from http://www.softinstitute.com/soft/
About the Author: Oleg Afonin specializes in software development and marketing of communication tools for small businesses.