Wondering if your internet connection is slow or if a website is running? Forget the speed tests, ping and you may know the answer in a matter of seconds.
Now, if you want a way to keep track of your network performance issues, there are several ping tools that can help you. Today we will see PingoMeter, which is a portable program, open source, written in C #, which displays the ping in the taskbar.
When you run PingoMeter you will see one icon on the taskbar. This icon displays a few dots as it starts procedure ping. When the ping is successful, you will notice a line appear on the icon which is a graph representing the ping value. It updates every few seconds, and if the value changes, you'll see the graph move up and down to indicate the change.
Because the icon is quite small, it can be a bit difficult to determine the performance of your network. So place your mouse pointer over the icon and a note will appear informing you of the ping IP address and ping value. The program pings by default to 8.8.8.8, which is Google's DNS server. The reading looks like this [8.8.8.8]: 4, where 4 is the ping.
Right-click the program icon on the taskbar and select "Settings". A window appears, which has three tabs: Basic, Advanced and About.
The basic tab can be used to set how often the program should update the chart, it is set to 3.000 milliseconds (ie 3 seconds). But, you can change this value. The Ping Interval determines the gap between 2 pings.
From there you can change instead of a graph in the icon to see a numeric value of ping from 0 to 99.
Let's go back to chart mode. Normally, when the connection is good, you will see a green bar. When the network is a bit slow, it turns yellow. If the connection is bad, the line turns red. Go to the PingoMeter settings to change them Colourthose of the three status indicators. You can also choose a different shade for the background if you have trouble seeing the bar on the default black background, or if you're using dark mode and want a lighter background color for the tray icon.
Go to the Advanced tab to change the IP address and enter the IP address of the server of your choice. What happens when a ping fails completely? Well, the program default settings will not notify you of this, the icon displays the three dots.
However, you can enable alarm options to notify you when the ping expires, when the connection is lost. This will allow PingoMeter to display a notification in the action center to indicate the status.
It would be nice if the program had a historical or larger graph in its settings to see the latest ping values. In its current state, it is a useful and discreet way to check if the internet is working properly.
