EZ Pinger for Windows

User Reviews

• A surprisingly useful utility, which rapidly becomes indispensible.

  junglejim459/1/2006

  Pros

  EZ Pinger is one of those utilities that you wonder whether you need when you first encounter it, but which grows on you rapidly when you see the point of it. It monitors the state of any computers you can connect to, and warns you by various means, including e-mail, if anything happens to any of them. It has a nicely-designed, flexible interface which allows you to monitor each host in the way that's most appropriate for that host. For some it may be pinging, for others it may be doing a test log-on to their ftp or http server, and so on. It logs its activities in a clear, accessible manner, and it's capable of running either as an application or as a Windows service. Support is good, mainly from its very responsive author via its user forum. <p> <p>There is a great deal of function built into EZ Pinger, and I've probably only used a small part of it. I run a number of computers distributed across several LANs, geographically separated, so data synchronization and backup across the LANs and the Internet is a critical issue. EZ Pinger is superb at keeping an eye on the machines, letting me know at the first sign of trouble (as yesterday, when one of them didn't come up properly after a short power outage). I've become very dependent on it now!

  Cons

  You do need to be comfortable with the basic workings of the Internet and the difference, for example, between a ping and a TCP packet. It's not that you need to understand in detail what these are; it's that EZ Pinger uses these terms in its interface, and if you don't know what they are you're not going to find it easy to understand what the interface is asking you to do.

  Summary

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