Using A TCP Viewer



A TCP viewer is a small program that monitors activity coming in and going out of you machine,
although many speak of a "TCP viewer" such programs often monitor UDP traffic also.

There are a few types of TCP viewer out there and most have the same features so I have chosen a common one that's cost free to demonstrate with
and its from a reliable source.
You can download the TCP viewer here.



Installation
One you have obtained the file you would be best advised to create a folder to install it in (Program Files/TCP Viewer/)
and create a shortcut to your start menu.



Starting The Program
Lets run the program and see whats happening with our internet traffic.




Looking at the row of top menus from the left we can see firstly the "File"menu lets take a peek at that



Not much of interest in this menu really, although we can usefully "Save" any of our displayed listings and also select a result on the screen and disconnect it using the "Close Connection", sometimes very useful for thinning down the traffic to allow a less cluttered result to be observed.


Moving along the menus, we can see the Options tab. There are some options here to display some of the information differently.



We have two useful options visible here, the first one is "Show Unconnected End Points"
and other is "Resolve Addresses", the remaining two options are self explanatory I hope.

Here is a view of the viewer resolving the IP addresses



Here is a view of the unresolved mode that simply displays the IP addresses, this is my preferred view for research.




Here is a view of the Unconnected End Points or "Open Sockets" as I like to describe them, these are connections that are either idle or listening or anything in between actually connected, not always required for general viewing but useful see what processes are doing what.




We have now reached the "Process"menu from this you can view which program controls wich process that your computer is undertaking and even close many as you can in the Task manager. For you to be able to use these menu options you will need to click on a process shown in the main screen list.




The "View" menu allows you to set the speed of how rapidly you want the program to recheck your network in/out activity, by following the "Update Speed" menu you can pause the program from continuing to check frequently or you can enter a time period between 1,2, or 5 seconds.
A further method of refreshing is by using the "Refresh Now"menu item, to refresh the connection data on the screen immediately.




And last of all we reach the final menu shown below that gives you the credits box(About..) and the useful "Help"Section that is provided with this free program.



That concludes the TCP Viewer guide folks, you will now be able to see connections (active or otherwise) that are interacting with your machine and gain valuable information regarding how many aspects of IP addressing are utilized.


I hope you have found this small guide helpful folks, its been written to introduce WinMX users to a simple tool that can be useful for many purposes, after all, knowledge is power.

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