iCheckConnection Utility

At PC Pitstop, we're pretty good at diagnosing and fixing problems on your PC. But one thing our Web site can't do for you is get you onto the Internet. So we did the next best thing: iCheckConnection is a command-line utility that you can keep on your PC and use to:

• Quickly pinpoint problems if you are having trouble connecting to the Internet or reaching a specific site.
• Measure the Internet bandwidth and latency between your machine and any site on the Internet.
• Verify that a site is running properly.

How it works

To help identify a bottleneck in your connection, iCheckConnection combines several functions. It can ping a server, trace the route to a server, and time the download from a Web or FTP site. It also performs basic checks on the status of your Internet connection by making sure that DNS is working and giving you correct answers.

Installing iCheckConnection

To install iCheckConnection, download the utility from one of the links to the right and save it to any directory, such as C:\WINDOWS, on the path on your system (i.e., any of the directories Windows automatically checks when trying to run a program--type PATH at a DOS prompt to see which directories are defined for your PC's path). This way, you can run the utility from any directory in DOS. There is no further installation.

Using iCheckConnection

To use iCheckConnection, open a DOS box, MS-DOS Prompt or Command Prompt window (click here for instructions on opening these windows). From the command line, type the following (where <address> is one or more ftp:// or http:// URLs, DNS names and/or IP addresses you wish to check, separated only by a space):

iCheckConnection <address>

iCheckConnection http://www.amazon.com www.yahoo.com

The iCheckConnection utility will ping all the servers for the sites you specify (http://www.amazon.com www.yahoo.com in our example). If you explicitly include the http:// or ftp:// prefix for a URL, the utility will also check the bandwidth (download time) for that site (http://www.amazon.com in our example). If you leave out the argument(s) (address) altogether, the utility will, by default, check the PC Pitstop servers.

For help using the utility once you've downloaded it, at the command line simply type: iCheckConnection help   . iCheckConnection will display some instructions and exit.

Click here for some more usage and formatting examples.

Diagnosing a problem

If there is a problem reaching any server, iCheckConnection will perform a traceroute to that server, and report the names of any hops with packet loss. If any site on the route fails to respond at all, iCheckConnection will report the name of the previous hop, and give up.