Microsoft Network Monitor

I recently received one of Microsoft's periodic download notification emails and one item in particular caught my eye as I had never heard of it before. It was a download of Microsoft's Network Monitor.

Now I've been dealing with networking in and out of work for many years and have always used Wireshark and will most likely continue to do so.  However, I will definitely be looking into Network Monitor more and would not be surprised if it became my tool of choice in some situations.

Accessing Network Connections on Windows XP

If you are dealing with issues with networking on a Windows machine one of the locations you are going to want to look at sooner or later is the Network Connections.  How you get there and what you see varies between Windows versions. From XP on it is mostly the same, so I figured a quick look at Network Connections on XP should provide most Windows users with a good starting point if they need to access their network settings.

Even within Windows XP there are several ways to get to Network Connections, so I'll the two most common ways to get there.

The first method is from the system task bar and it is the quickest way to bring up the Network Connections. However, depending on the system settings it may not always be accessible.