Is-It-On

Since most activities can be performed online nowadays, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your connection at all times. Sure enough, Windows prompts you whenever connection is lost. However, you can also rely on third-party alternatives like Is-It-On, with a slim design, intuitive status display, and RAS connection analysis.

The application is portable, which means it doesn’t depend on an installation process to work. However, it hasn’t received any updates in quite some time, with a high chance of it being unable to detect modern network, and Internet connection options. On the other hand, you can try running it under compatibility settings, and with administrator privileges.

On launch, it spends a couple of seconds to analyze your network adapters, and shows the corresponding status. There are three possible options, such as totally disconnected from Network, LAN Connection, and behind Internet network proxy. If the first is marked, the other two are automatically grayed out.

The application can scan RAS connections in case you’re using, or connecting remotely. This operation is toggled at the press of a button, and has little to no impact on general behavior.

Unfortunately, you need to keep the application on the desktop for real time analysis, because it can’t minimize to tray area. There are no alerts to configure for sudden changes, so you need to manually check every time. It doesn’t start with Windows, but this can be bypassed by manually placing a shortcut in the Startup folder.

Apart from simple connection status, the application can also show a great deal of information about network adapters. A list shows up with info fields for adapter name, description, IP address, DHCP server, gateway, primary wins, as well as secondary wins.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Is-It-On comes with good intentions, but without an alert system to let you know when changes occur, as well as possible compatibility issues with modern Windows iterations might make you look for alternatives.