Flaky Internet Connection? Gather the evidence first

So the home internet connection has become poorly this last month. Seems like a few times daily that everything just freezes up. Facebook posts don’t load, chrome just hangs, and within a minute my son is complaining that his xbox is down. I look at the AT&T router flashing its green lights, and then see a hiccup as the lights go out, the box makes an audible click, and the system reboots. A minute later and all is well.

Call the internet service provider and ask if anyone else in the neighborhood is having problems? Who isn’t? Have the service guy come out and poke around? It’ll work perfectly when he is here.

First things first. Gather the evidence. How often does the internet go down?

Should be a free program for that. I can launch a command line, type “ping -t 8.8.8.8” (see here), and see how things are going. Just need a timer (do it once every 30 seconds), and write to a log file so I can check it daily and see what it happening. 10 min to write a script for this, right?

But someone should have already written something like this. However, a google search for something ran into all sorts of problems. Lots of programs out there, but they charge? What? Or a free download and 30 days trial? No thanks.

Oh here is a free tool from a reputable site. Got all the right names, “Internet Connection Monitor”. But I installed this pita and the icon just sat there in my taskbar and wouldn’t load a window. Tried to uninstall it and windows locked up for about 5 min. Even revo-uninstaller is spinning its wheels. May have to reboot before deleting this poc. But enough about that.

Try Internet Connectivity Monitor. Does exactly what I asked for, doesn’t install anything (just run it out of the downloaded/extracted folder), and there you go.