Android IT Apps - Part 1: Ping

I have been playing around with a few applications on my android (Froyo on HTC Incredible) for my job.  I was looking for a good ping app.  I looked at a few.  All the one here are free.  But I only found one of them especially useful.

Net Status - does a bunch of things well but I didn't find it extremely useful.  also the typeface is too small on my android

Ping and DNS - Okay but not intuitive or very useful

Network Ping - easy to use, ping count is configurable

Ping - This, IMHO, is the best of the bunch.  It is ad supported.  You easily enter any number of single computers either in IP form or domain name.  Once entered the program can ping them all with a readout of the ping time in milliseconds, or ping any one separately.  There is a color indicator next to each entry which is green - for good connection, darkening shades of orange - as the connection time takes longer, red if the app cannot ping the destination address.  When pinging a single address you can export the results (csv).  One of the things that sets this app apart from the rest is that it keeps your list of computers so you can easily tap "Ping All" to get an instant read of your network.

Computers were a breeze to add and the app is easy to use and helpful.

Find out whats taking up space on your computer

Image via Wikipedia

Over the years I have used many different programs to look at hard drives in order to see what is taking up all the room. Some applications are great in that they display the information graphically. But the absolute best app I've used for this purpose is also FREE. WinDirStat (for win xp/vista/7) is available in an installer and as a portable application (I love portable applications).

One of the best things about WinDirStat is that not only does it display the make up of your hard drive in graphical and tree format, as well as providing you the option to display free space, it also color codes it and let's you click on anything and delete the file(s)/folder(s) by pressing the delete key.

Recently my 1TB backup drive gave me an error that it was full. I ran WinDirStat on it and found at least 10 occurrences of the same outdated 1gb file. I also found there was some old recycler files from a previous computer, another 9gb freed. By the time I was finished I had freed up over 600gb! Not bad for 30 minutes work.

What's even more amazing is you can run this app over a network. So I periodically use it to clean up my network shares. Because it's portable there is no installation and I can run it on virtually any windows box I come to.

I highly recommend this software to everyone who uses a windows computer.

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