WinPing – Enhanced Ping for Windows

The Windows ping command is probably one of the most commonly used commands for IT Administrators! It’s used to check that network connections between two machines are working or that a computer/server is up and running.

Even though I like the ping command, I would prefer a tool that is more powerful. That’s where a free program like WinPing comes in real handy.

WinPing is a free program that you can use to test your network connection. Simply enter a valid host name or IP address and WinPing will ping the address and give you back the results.

When you start the program, which requires no installation by the way, you will get a window where you can enter the host name you want to ping and some other buttons.

To get started, go ahead and type a host name and press the Ping button.

It will convert a host name to IP addresses and vice versa. It quickly pings the host name and gives you the results in milliseconds. So that’s pretty much the same as using the normal command prompt right?

Well the first difference is that you can easily save the results of your pings out to a text file. You can export ping output easily by pressing the Save button.

But what’s the point of just saving a small set of ping output? That’s when the program start coming in handy Click on the Options button and you’ll see this window:

Here is where you can configure the settings for the program. MultiPing allows several pings one after the other. Under Time, the Timeout is the duration in milliseconds under which a response should be received to not be considered timed out.

The Tempo is the amount of time in milliseconds between each ping (default it is set to 0). Under Misc, you can show averages so as you perform pings over time, you can quickly see what the average response time is.

Also, here you can tell the program to show the Country name, which is very cool. The programs comes with a huge databases of IP address mapped to Country names, so if you ping an IP Address for a server in France, it’ll actually tell you that.

The best part of the Options, however, is the fact that you can turn on an Infinite Loop. You can also do this with the standard ping command, but with WinPing, you get really cool real-time graphs. Enable Infinite Loop and choose a Tempo that is slightly higher. Then click OK.

Now click Ping again and you’ll start to see a continual ping with the average response time at the right:

Now click on the Graph button at the right and you will see a real-time graph of the data.

Pretty neat eh! You can click the Options button and then save the current curve out by clicking Save. All the boxes at the top that have “PingCurve1”, etc in them are if you want to load up several ping curves that you had saved out previously.