Windows Network Instability Guide

Using the internet or local network has become very common in our day-to-day lives. We use a lot of software that requires a reliable network connection, whether that is an internet browser, remote software, or a streaming application, on occasion there can be instances where the strength of the network can cause performance or quality issues, like the buffering of a video. Nobody wants that or needs that, in this article, I will briefly demonstrate how you can check if your network is the cause of your woes and if it needs fixing.

Understanding an Unstable Network Connection

When connecting to a website, remote software, server, or anything else, your computer initiates a conversation between it and the end machine to start sending and receiving information. At times computers can fail to send and receive information for various reasons, this is known as a connection drop. If you are constantly experiencing loading screens when using an application that is communicating out through the network, it could well be that your computer is experiencing connection drops.

When a computer sends information across to another computer and receives information back, it takes a certain amount of time, which is measured in ms (milliseconds). The lower the ms the shorter the amount of time for your computer to load whatever it is being requested to load. If it takes a long time for a packet (A packet is a small amount of data sent through the network) to come back to your machine, you will likely experience some sort of quality, loading, or performance issues with your application.

Checking for Connection Drops Using Command Prompt

Windows machines have a built-in application called command prompt, which can be used to test your network connection. To access the command prompt search for 'CMD' or 'Command Prompt' in your Windows start search bar and open it. Once you are in the command prompt, to test the network you need to write and execute a command.

Let's say you are using YouTube and find that it is constantly buffering and slow, simply type in the command below within command prompt and hit enter to start sending the test packets of information to YouTube.

ping www.YouTube.com -t

The word ping is the command, the website is the destination of where we want to send the packets of information, and the -t is an addition to the ping command to make the packets of information continually send, without the -t, your computer would send the packets of information 4 times and stop.

Below we have an example of running the command over to YouTube, when looking for connection drops here, we are looking for large times. The bigger the time, the longer it took for your computer to receive information back from its destination computer. If the time is large and you are loading a video on YouTube, it will take longer to load as the information required to load the video is taking longer to come back to your machine.

From my experience, anything under 100ms is good while staying under 50ms is excellent and will definitely help when using network-intensive applications or games. If you find the milliseconds are around 200ms, don't panic as this can be acceptable and should not cause too much of an issue, however, if you find the time is constantly hitting 250+ milliseconds, you may want to check your network setup.

Another thing to look out for when running this test is for any lines that say 'Request timed out', this line means your computer sent the test message but did not get any replies back for it. This is not a good sign and if it appears frequently in the test, definitely investigate further to see why it is happening and fix it to prevent issues from popping up in your network applications.

Checking for Connection Drops Using PingPlotter

Pingplotter is a great tool to investigate network performance issues, I have used it many times and it has helped me a lot. PingPlotter is third-party software and can be downloaded from the PingPlotter website.

PingPlotter is very easy to use and provides detailed information on the network connection, for example, you can see whether a connection issue is within your home or if it is in your local estate or with your internet service provider. I highly recommend this software if you need to run a test on your network.

For more information on how to use PingPlotter please click this link: PingPlotter video guides. This link will take you to the Pingman Tools, YouTube channel. Pingman Tools is the company that created PingPlotter. It is best if you follow their guides to understand how to use their software.