For our first article on networking, we'll start with the most basic tool available for networking - Ping.

It doesn't get much more simple than this and yet it can be a very useful tool .

Ping can be useful for quickly checking if you have connectivity to your network, and the internet. 

Windows Users

If you are a Windows user you already have a ping tool built into your system.

The first thing you need to do is open a command prompt.

To do this you can hold Windows Key and press R,  or go click on your start menu and select 'Run'.

When the run dialog pops up, type 'cmd' and press enter.

Opening up a run window

You will now have a command prompt that looks something like this :

A blank command prompt

Now you can type 'ping [IP/URL you want to ping]'

 For example, here I am pinging the router on my network :

Pinging the default gateway

You can see the address you are getting ping replies from, the time it took and the TTL (Time To Live)

More about that later..

Here is the same method, but pinging google.com 

We can ping google to check we have connectivity to the internet

This tells us we have connectivity to google.com and the average time for a packet to reach us from google.com is 51ms (milliseconds.)