A free download · one file · nothing is uploaded
The test on this site measures your connection from inside a browser tab, and a browser tab is not allowed to look at your own network. Four of the most useful things about a connection are therefore invisible to it — and they are the four that most often explain why a fast line feels slow. This small program runs on your own machine, so it can see all four.
Signal strength, noise, band, channel width and the rate the radio negotiated. By far the most common reason a fast line feels slow is the last few metres through the air, and it is the one part no website can measure.
Catches the trap that costs people the most: a gigabit connection plugged into a socket that agreed 100 megabits. The speed test reads 94, the provider gets blamed, and the cause is usually a damaged cable a metre away. Invisible without this, and obvious with it.
This is the one that settles arguments. Measuring your own router separately splits the connection at your front door: delay or loss that is already there happened inside your home, and delay or loss that only appears further out is on the line. Those two lead to opposite actions, and guessing between them wastes enormous amounts of people’s time.
Everything connected to your router and, where it can be worked out, what each thing is. Not a speed diagnosis — an idle device costs you nothing — but a straight answer to a different question worth asking.
One file. Nothing to install, no account, no background service. Run it and it opens a page in your browser; close the window and it is gone.
Windows 10 or 11.
Download for Windows On an ARM machine (Surface Pro X and similar): ARM versionEvery release is published with its SHA-256 hash, so you can check the file you received is the file that was built.
ChecksumsWindows shows a blue “Windows protected your PC” box, and macOS says the app cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified. Both mean one thing: the file is not signed with a code-signing certificate.
It is worth being precise about this, because the common explanation is wrong. Signing would not make the warning go away. Microsoft’s own documentation is explicit that a certificate no longer buys instant trust — even the expensive Extended Validation kind, which used to. SmartScreen now warns about any new program until enough people have downloaded and run it without incident, which takes weeks and hundreds of installs. A brand-new tool gets the warning either way. The only route with no warning at all is the Microsoft Store, because Microsoft re-signs what it distributes.
So rather than pretend otherwise: this program is new, and your computer is right to say so. What it is telling you is “I have not seen this before” — not “I have found something wrong with this.” Those are different statements, and the box does not distinguish them.
Here is what you can check instead of taking anyone’s word for it.
Get-FileHash ~\Downloads\ping-argus-windows-x64.exe127.0.0.1 — an address that means “this machine only” and is not
reachable from anywhere else, including from another computer on the same Wi-Fi.Once you have checked whatever you want to check, this is how to run it anyway.
Click More info on the blue box, then Run anyway.
Right-click the file and choose Open, then Open again in the box that appears. Double-clicking will not offer that choice; right-clicking does. If macOS refuses entirely, open Terminal and run:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/ping-argus-macos-apple-silicon chmod +x ~/Downloads/ping-argus-macos-apple-silicon
chmod +x ~/Downloads/ping-argus-linux-x64 ~/Downloads/ping-argus-linux-x64
This is worth being clear about, because it is the whole design. The program is not a second test with a second set of results to reconcile against the first. It is the part of one test that a browser tab is not permitted to perform. Run it, and it hands what it finds to the test on this site, which then reaches conclusions neither half could reach alone.
Nothing installs. A small window opens with a line of text in it, and that window is the program — closing it is how you quit.
You do not have to come back here and find anything. The program checks that the site is reachable and opens it for you. If the site cannot be reached — which is worth knowing in itself — it opens its own offline check instead and tells you why.
The page will say the helper has been found. From then on the single Test my connection button runs both halves at the same moment, and there is nothing else to press. Leave the program’s window open until the results appear.
Findings that came from your own machine appear in the same ranked list as everything else, marked as measured locally. Where the two halves disagree, the one that measured directly wins and says so.
These are the conclusions that exist only because both were running at once. None of them is available to a website alone, and none to a local tool alone.
Nothing leaves your computer. There is no account, no upload, no analytics and no telemetry in the program. The report exists in the window while it is open and is gone when you close it.
The one thing it will do, if you ask it to, is hand its findings to this website so they appear beside the rest of your results. That happens entirely inside your own browser — the page asks the program running on your machine, and the answer never travels over the internet at all. It only ever happens when you press the button, and the program refuses to answer any website other than this one.
It will print the same findings as text and exit, without opening anything:
ping-argus -text
Add -json for the full report as data, or -no-device-scan to skip looking for other
devices on your network.
The app is not signed, and this page says so plainly rather than burying it. A tool whose entire argument is that it does not do anything behind your back should not start by hiding the first awkward thing you will encounter.