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Miscellaneous Software

Ping Multiple Computers Simultaneously

SUMMARY: Help determine the scope of network connection problems by pinging multiple IP addresses or host names simultaneously with PingInfoView.

Are you having difficulty accessing certain sites on the Internet? Or are you a system administrator and need to constantly check if Internet-connected machines on your network are alive and responding to "ping" requests?

Don't open multiple command prompt windows to run the ping command when you can use the freeware PingInfoView application from NirSoft, available for Windows 2000 - Vista.

PingInfoView pinging multiple host names

PingInfoView lets you interactively add a list of host names and/or IP addresses to ping, or if you frequently need to ping the same computers you can load a list from a text file. You can configure options such as the ping timeout, how often to ping, and whether or not to remember the list of sites to ping between sessions.

PingInfoView will display the number of successful and failed ping requests, the percentage of failure, the last ping status and time, the average ping time, and other information. You can even generate an HTML report (see the "View" menu), useful to share when discussing computer / network problems with other system administrators or coworkers.

The program comes as a ZIP file and no installer is necessary - unpack the files into a new folder and run PingInfoView.exe from there.

* PingInfoView: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/multiple_ping_tool.html

This tip was written regarding PingInfoView v1.25 and screenshots were taken on a Windows Vista machine. Features, information, and screenshots for other versions / operating systems may vary.

Please do not ping computers indiscriminately. Also, some computers may not return ping requests even though they are connected to the Internet. This can be due to system or network configuration, hardware/software firewalls, security software, etc.