When pumping media around the house you are going to need a very capable network. Whether it’s wired or wireless, one thing’s for sure is that all the bandwidth available will have to be allocated to the task of streaming your favourite movies or audio between the different rooms in your home. So keeping an eye on your network for problems will be a priority. Anybody can do this with the aid of these ten free home neworking tools.
Compass Free
If you like WireShark, you’ll love this. It provides anybody who has a keen interest in their network activity with a platform to delve deeper into its usage. You’ll be able to view detailed reports, compare and correlate data over time, view shaded bar/pie charts and take advantage of the interactive network forensics dashboard.
IPvFox
When you connect to a web page, the norm is for different elements to be loaded from different web servers. These can be for image delivery, analytics, social networking etc. Use this Firefox extension to keep an eye on all these connections and whether there’s any unauthorised connections from browser-installed spyware.
LAN Speed Test
Double check that your wireless or wired networks are yielding the transfer speeds they’re supposed to be. LAN Speed Test builds a file into memory and then uploads it and downloads it whilst keeping track of the time. If the end result isn’t what it should be, you probably have a problem with your network’s wiring or router.
NetBalancer Free
By adjusting network priority you’ll be able to give application a certain amount of bandwidth. NetBalancer can tweak download and upload rates for any applications. The best thing being that an application with a low priority won’t be limited if an application with a higher priority isn’t in use.
Prioritise certain applications and their use of your network’s bandwidth
Network Scanner
It’s not often that you’ll find a piece of freeware with a featureset aimed at both professional system administrators and home networking hobbyists. But Network Scanner falls neatly underneath both with it being a multi-threaded IP, NetBIOS and SNMP-capable scanner.
NetworkTrafficView
Here we have a simple packet sniffer. NetworkTrafficView captures the packets passing through your computer’s network adapter and then displays general statistics about the data bouncing around your LAN. To get the most out of this software you’ll need either the WinPcap Capture Driver or Microsoft’s Network Monitor Driver.
NetWorx
An ailing data throughput is normally the first sign that things are not quite right on your home network. With NetWorx you can configure alerts that inform you when a connection goes down or when there’s some suspicious activity like some unusually heavy data flow on your copper cables or microwaves.
SmartSniff
A more advanced packet sniffer than NetworkTrafficView, SmartSniff dissects captured packets and views them as a converstion between clients and servers. These conversations can be opened in Ascii for text-based protocols or as a hex dump for non text-based protocols such as DNS.
Ensure that there are no unwanted packets clogging up your network’s bandwidth
Wireless Network Watcher
One of the biggest causes of wireless network slowdown is when some miscreant hops onto and starts using your WiFi without an invitation. You can pinpoint when this occurs with Wireless Network Watcher, which displays each computer or device on the same wireless network, with IP address, device name, MAC address, and network adapter manufacturer.
Wireless Wizard
Should you find that your any of your WiFi, LTE, WiMAX, 3G, or 2G wireless networks aren’t performing as they should you can use this program to increase reliability. Wireless Wizard makes it easy to aim your wireless adapter, measure network performance and quickly identify and fix wireless broadband problems.
All these great tools are part of issue 314 of PC Plus, on the shelves on 18th October 2011. Subscribe today to the paper edition and you can get it up to a week early! Subscribe to PC Plus.
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