How to Test Your Ping Time

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If you play games online, you may want to test your ping time to any game server or website to see how good the connection is or isn't. Doing so is actually a pretty straightforward process once you get to your command prompt.

Step 1

Press the "Windows" key and "R" on your keyboard to open the Run dialog box.

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Step 2

Type "cmd" into the Open field and click "OK" to open the command prompt window.

Step 3

Ping one of the fastest server networks on the Internet, such as Google, to test ping time. Type "ping -t google.com" (without quotes) at the command prompt and hit "Enter." Ping tells the computer that you want to do a ping test; -t tells it you want to keep pinging until you tell it to stop. In this example, the domain name google.com is the target. If you want to test your connection speed to a game server and know the IP address, replace google.com with the game server address.

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Step 4

Notice the "time" column in the list of results. This tells you how much time in milliseconds it takes for the ping to make it back. A ping is simply a tiny packet of data that's sent to a server with a note that tells the server to bounce it back immediately. As the test runs, you'll start to see entries. You can let it run as long as you want; press "Ctrl"+"C" to stop it.

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Step 5

Look at the summary of results at the bottom of the window after you stopped the ping test. You should see the fastest (minimum) and slowest (maximum) times as well as the average time. A shorter ping time is better because you can load webpages and play online games in real time with less delay. Also listed is the packet loss. Lost packets mean they never made it to the server or the server didn't reply. With low-quality websites on bad Web servers, you might lose a couple packets, but to Google, you should have 0 percent loss.

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