The ping utility in Windows is really useful to determine if there is a connectivity between the source and destination computer. You need to run Ping in command prompt together with the options as it doesn’t come with a friendly graphical user interface. I remembered attending a MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineering) class about 8 years ago and there was an arrogant guy that talks like he knows everything but then he ran the ping directly from Run (Start > Run) and he had a blank look on his face thinking what went wrong when a black window appears for a second and then disappeared. Well the good thing about command line utilities is the flexibility so you can use it in batch or scripts but it requires you manually type the command switches instead of clicking with your computer mouse.
I am doing a research on something regarding IP addresses and the built-in PING utility in Windows is not powerful enough as I require time stamping. I need to know exactly when I am able to get a response on the destination IP address or when it times out.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the Windows ping does not show the date and time at the ping results. After searching on the Internet, I found a free third party ping utility called hrPING which offer more features with accurate results than Windows PING.
hrPING is also a command line utility, meaning you have to launch command prompt first then only run hrPING with the extra commands from there.
I need to ping with:
1. time stamp
2. loop ping until manually stopped
3. save the ping results to a text file
The command to use with hrPING is:
hrping.exe -t -T -F pingresult.txt 192.168.2.1
Do take note of the character capitalization in options because they are different. For example, -t is for ping loop and -T is for time stamp. Another hrPING’s default option is it pings once every half a second or 500 millisecond. If you find it too fast, simply add -s 1000 to the command line and it will only ping once every second. For more options, you can either run hrPING.exe without any options which will show you the list of options, or visit hrPING’s official website at the link below.