Nifty LAN Speed Test Utility

Scenario: I have a local network which is part wired and part wireless. Depending on what’s going on, connected to this network are as many as eight desktop computers (six PCs, two Macs), four laptop computers (three PCs, one Mac), one iPad, one PDA, and/or two NAS devices. Usually it works. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out whether the wireless router is somewhat dodgy (because the laptops occasionally lose their connection and the iPad doesn’t make a connection about half the times I turn it on) and/or whether the new NAS is a POS, in short. Answering these questions partly involves figuring out how fast data is moving from one place to another.

So, I nosed around at download.com briefly and came up with a very handy utility called LAN Speed Test, appropriately enough. It exists in a free version which was enough to perform the diagnoses I needed, and a newer version that costs $5 but adds several nice features and enhancements. I paid the five bucks to the author even though the free version was adequate for my tests because five bucks is a bargain for a program that’s this useful, and besides I figure that it’s good for my karma to buy software from my fellow small developers.

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The upshot of my testing is that my new NAS is pretty good but my router has got to go. Thumbs up for LAN Speed Test, without which it would have taken me far more time and trouble to arrive at these conclusions.

By adam

Go ahead, try to summarize yourself in a sentence or two.

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