I want check my ISP's availability (check for outages for bill dispute)

[Epidemic]

is there a good simple utility that will run in the background and ping a couple of sites on a regular interval so that I can determine my ISP's outage rate.

[Keymaker]

You can use this It will display a graph after about an hour. If your router blocks ICMP input pings, it won't work. So temporally turn it off.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/multipinggrapher.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/connectionmon.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/colasoftping.htm

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/Pin...otterfree.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/Per.../perfping.html

For servers: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/ipcheck.html

[RobRich]

Thread moved to networking forum.

Read your Terms of Service contract. There is a good chance you have about zero legal grounds to dispute the charges unless you have a business-class ISP account. You might get a credit for residential ISP service, but good luck and YMMV.

[Epidemic]

I have gotten credit many times before. however, I want to be more scientific and see how far i can push it. Until DSL becomes available I have to suffer through this so I might as well try to beat em up as much as possible.

[Steve R Jones]

Keep in mind you need to be able to prove your pc was turned on

You'd also need to be able to prove that this magic software is 100% reliable.

[Epidemic]

I could do that but, I am not going at them with the data per say. I need accurate data that matches their records. So that when I bitch about outage's on x,y,z they actually find me to be accurate and credible.

[Keymaker]

The smokping would be your best then..

[Praetorian]

Check out PingPlotter.

Beware of running it for long periods of times (weeks on end). It'll chew up your RAM.