Portable HoverIP

Portable HoverIP is a suite of IP utilities that allow you to scan ports and IPs, ping a configured host, perform trace routes and manage the routes with minimum effort.

This isn’t the kind of tool aimed at beginners and the lack of a help manual should scare them away even more, but the truth is that Portable HoverIP is quite easy to use, at least as long as you have necessary knowledge or experience.

The program’s GUI is the main element that makes this possible because it relies on a tabbed layout, which gives you the possibility to quickly jump to the tool you need.

In plain English, the one-window interface provides access to “IP Config”, “Nslookup”, “Routing table”, “Ping”, “Traceroute” and “Port scanning” utilities, each of them boasting its very own set of options.

The first tab is obviously supposed to provide information on your network configuration, so it shows details such as the MAC address of the selected adapter, IP mask, default gateway and DNS servers, DHCP status and server and node type. You can release or renew IP with a single click.

While the “Nslookup” requires an address or domain to check and provide information, the ping utility enables you to send either a defined number of pings or an infinite one, with all results displayed in a very clean and easy to read panel.

“Port Scanning” in its turn comes with three other tabs, letting you scan open ports on a specific host (which you have to define, or course), search systems with open ports within a specific IP range and access the ports table to see the purpose of each port.

In most cases, Portable HoverIP works flawlessly regardless of the Windows versions and we’ve experienced a very low CPU usage during our testing.

Which leads us to a rather simple conclusion: Portable HoverIP is a very effective piece of software and since it’s addressed to more experienced users, the lack of a help manual shouldn’t bother you too much.