The instruction's below were tested on Windows XP only.
1) Click on the "Start Menu" then click on "Run".
2) Type "command" (without quotes) into the run box and click OK.
3) Wait for text to appear on the screen.
4) Type "ping" (without quotes) followed by a space and the web host's domain.
Example: "ping www.trap17.com" (without quotes)
5) Wait for text to finish appearing on the screen.
6) The text on the screen should look something like this:

The thing that we are intrested in is the very last number (shown in bold above). That number shows the average number of milliseconds it took the host to respond to your computers ping request.
Note 1: Note that the response time is not limited to server's connection, but the Internet itself, and and user's connection.
Note 2: The ping request works for checking the speed of all websitesm not just web hosts.

Nice it works

Wow this actually worked .. Awesome tutorial which even works on my crapy computer too.. But I have only one small question what means all thous IP and byte sizes which showes up? .. Im not very smart in such things.. GooD JoB by the way uiop.. Kepp the tutorials coming

of course it will work on a crappy computer. this uses ms dos. i mainly use this to test if my connection is working, or if my ISP is down.

There are some neat useful options that come with "ping", for example, try this command:

ping www.trap17.com -w 5000 -t -l 65500

This command pings www.trap17.com, the "-w" attribute (followed by 5000) tells the program to wait 5 seconds (5x1000 milliseconds = 5000 milliseconds = 5 seconds) between each ping and the "-l" attribute (followed by 65500) tells the program to use a specified buffer size, in this case, it is 65500 bytes (that's pretty much large), you can call that a "heavy duty" ping. And finally, the "-t" attribute makes the program ping the specified address until you stop it manually.

If you would like to do a more advanced ping, try "tracert"! Type it in your CMD prompt and you will see through what servers does your little package go!

Example:
tracert www.trap17.com

Result:

you can pull down old servers like that. and if you get tons of people to do it at once, you can take down people's networks...i also don't recommend you do that or you'll have a call from your ISP and the FBI knocking at your door

LOL!
That's just plain WRONG, and you can't "kill" a server like that! You can only choke up it's connection to the internet, and that's still a maybe (first condition: a xxx MBps connection).

Such attacks are called DoS (denial of service) attacks and attacks from multiple computers are called DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service attacks). If you intentionally use them, then there is a **SMALL** chance that you will get in trouble. Anyway, if you ping a server like you're crazy (with large packets), you will probably be warned first. And if you are dumb enough not to stop, then you will (again: maybe) get into trouble. This is the worst case scenario... But, when you ping a server, you BARELY do anything to it! If you open a web site hosted by that server, you will do more "damage" to it then pinging it!!! After all, servers were made to serve, right? Besides, if the server feels that you are pinging it too much, it can simply ban your IP address, and... end of story.

So, feel free to use “ping”, FBI doesn't care !

oh yeah, thats a great manual ^^...

I can ping any IP with this system?

Thanks all..

Cpuser

Yea, I know a person who made a program that did this in VB class at school, and he took down the web server because it pinged a infinate amount of times. Fortunately, he was friends with the District Tech Coordinator, so he didn't get in trouble.