BPing

Designed to enhance the ping command in Windows, Bping provides an alternative that brings to the table a few additional options.

Among these, the most obvious one is the beeping sound it makes when a reply from the target host is received, just like an ICU monitor. Alternatively, you can configure it to make a sound whenever the host fails to respond. Either way, the advantage is that you don't have to look at the monitor to check the host's status.

If you don't fancy the beep sound Bping makes, you can use the PC's internal speaker instead, lower the volume, or mute it altogether. Alternatively, the application enables you to specify a WAV file to use. In other words, Bping can start playing a song each time a response is received to the echo request, although keep in mind that you might want a simple short sound for obvious reasons.

By default, Bping uses google.com as the host to check but giving it a hostname or an address as a parameter will make it change its target. Running the help option will reveal a list of all the other available options, together with a few usage examples, allowing you to understand how things work with Bping.

You can change the ping timeout, and the number of ICMP echo requests to send. Other options enable you to perform IP address resolving to hostnames and perform a quick scan of the entire network to detect all the available computers.

The utmost feature of Bping is that it makes a sound whenever an echo response message is received. Other than the extra features above, it operates exactly as the ping command in Windows, enabling you to verify that a specific host can connect to the TCP/IP network.