Wondering if your connection to Internet is it slow or if a website is working? Forget speed tests, run a ping and you might know the answer in 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 an icon in the taskbar. This icon shows some dots as it starts the ping process. When ping is successful, you will notice that a line appears in the icon which is a graph representing the ping value. It is updated every few seconds and if the value differs, you will see the chart move up and down to indicate the change.
Because the icon is quite small, it can be a bit difficult to determine your network performance. So hover over the icon and a note will appear, informing you of the pinged IP address and the ping value. The program sends pings from prechoice at 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 the graph mode. Normally, when the connection is good, you will see a green line. When the grid is a little slow, it turns yellow. If the connection is poor, the line turns red. Go to PingoMeter settings to change the colors of the three status indicators. You can also choose a different background color if you find it difficult to see the line in the default black background or if you are using dark mode and want a lighter background color for the disc 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 record or larger graph in its settings to see recent ping values. In its current state, it's a useful and discreet way to check if the internet is working well.
