Having Wi-Fi troubles? That sounds familiar. I’ve had so many problems with Wi-Fi networks that it’s hard to count them. Despite that, I’ve probably only managed to work out what the problem is once or twice.

That’s why I now enlist the help of an app to find out what’s going on. There are a bunch of apps you can use, but one that I’ve come across recently is called WifiDiagnosticsView. This free app monitors your Wi-Fi network’s key parameters — from the time that changes occur on your network, to when connection failure is detected.

When problems do occur, you get error codes that you can then look up online. You can also see information like when there’s a change in signal quality, whether you have security enabled on your Wi-Fi network, and your SSID. Here’s how to get the app up and get it running in the background on your PC.

What to do:

• Download and install WifiDiagnosticsView.
• From the top menu select Options then select Put Icon on Tray.
• Then, next time you’d like to check your Wi-Fi for any connection issues, you can simply choose the app’s icon from the system-tray to open it.

I hope that helps you get some insight into what your Wi-Fi network is doing and when those unavoidable problems occur. An added benefit is that now that you’re armed with more data, you can be a little more specific about the date, time, and type of outages if you need to complain to your internet provider.

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Author: Dominic Bayley, Australian Editor, PCWorld