Ping command is one of the effective ways to troble shoot network related problems. Ping basically checks whether the connection between network devices are properly comunicating. You can check the connections between computers or router to computer. Only thing you need
to identfy is the IP addresses of each devices in order to use PING command.
First you should know how to check the IP address of a computer and your router. First your computer must be connected to another device (router, modem)
In windows XP
Start > Run > type "cmd" and enter. It will open the command line.
In Windows Vista
Start > in Search type "cmd" and select the command link and click to open the command line.
Then in command line type "ipconfig"
and enter. It will give you a list of IP address.
IP Address 192.168.1.2 is the address of your computer.
Default Gateway 192.168.1.1 is the IP address of your router.
Next step is to PING 192.168.1.1 to check the connection between your computer and router.
Type ping 192.168.1.1 in the command line and if you get the result Packets sent 4, Received 4 and Lost 0, That means the connection between the router and the computer is working fine.
Then you can ping a website to check the Internet connection.
Type "ping www.google.com" in the command line. And if you get the same result as before that means the Internet connection is working as well.
If you have any kind of problem with the connection ping result will give some Lost packets and you need to trouble shoot the connection. Ping is a really simple but handy command to identify the network related problems.
