Ping a Ding Ding

Ping a Ding Ding is a tiny and portable networking utility that gives you the possibility to send the ping command to any IP address in your local network, in order to test the connectivity strength between the two machines.

It can be used to make sure two or more computers have a connection strong enough to play video games in LAN, for example.

Since there is no installation involved, you can drop the .exe file in any part of the hard disk or on a USB flash drive, and double-click it to launch the program. It doesn't make any changes to the Windows registry and doesn't need any DLLs to run. It remembers modified settings on exit.

As far as the interface is concerned, Ping a Ding Ding adopts a plain-looking window with a neatly organized structure. It's split into three panes for pinging machines, customizing preferences, and setting up alerts.

A computer can be pinged by specifying its local or public IP address or host name, and clicking the "Start" button. By default, Ping a Ding Ding checks the connectivity every 5 seconds and continuously returns results until halted by the user.

These results include the ping date and time, reply time (in milliseconds) and resolved DNS, in addition to the last success and fail times, amount of sent, received and lost packets, along with minimum, maximum and average roundtrip time.

It's possible to select the preferred alert notification on ping completion (air horn, blow out, ding), as well as modify the default ping time, size of packets, timeout and TTL.

You can hide the utility to the systray, instruct it to minimize and auto-ping at startup, limit ping results to 1000 lines, clear stats and history at ping start, as well as assign any WAV audio tracks to play on failed DNS, failed and successful pings.

It worked smoothly in our tests, without triggering the OS to hang, crash or prompt error messages. CPU and RAM consumption was minimal.

Although it doesn't integrate options for pinging multiple computers at the same time, Ping a Ding Ding offers intuitive options for sending the ping command to a computer in the local network.