NetTools

NetTools is a practical software application that contains a collection of networking utilities, such as ping, trace route, name and DNS lookup, finger, and whois. It lets you define parameters, perform scan operations, examine network statistics, and save results to file.

The installer takes little time and minimal effort. As far as the interface is concerned, NetTools adopts a classical-looking window with a well-structured layout for each network tool.

The default window is dedicated to the ping command. You can specify the host, interval, timeout, size and number of pings (one time or continuous), run the scans, and view results with the packets and reply time, in addition to the total sent, received, lost, minimum, maximum, and average packets. Similarly, you can ping a range of IP addresses.

To perform a trace route, you can indicate the host, maximum number of hops, timeout and packet size, wait for the scan to finish, and check out results with the response times and resolved names.

Moreover, you can find out the computer name and local IP address of a host, run scans on an address range, as well as scan a host within a given port range and specify the TCP and UDP timeout.

If you want to look up a specific DNS address, it's necessary to define parameters with the host name, DNS server, retries count and timeout. NetTools can be asked to query PTR, any or specific records, such as the host address, name servers, alias name, or email exchanger.

It's possible to scan services by inputting the starting and ending address, along with the protocol type (TCP, UDP or both), port number, and timeout for TCP and UDP.

The finger command can be sent by entering the host or PC user name, and it's also possible to request long responses. For the whois feature you can select the query and server, while the throughput command needs a URL, user name and password to work.

Although it hasn't been updated for a long while, NetTools still works on newer Windows editions. It had minimal impact on computer performance in our tests, and didn't hang, crash or prompt error messages.

Unfortunately, the demo edition has some severe limitations. Otherwise, NetTools comes loaded with advanced and approachable networking utilities for all user levels.