Calmar - 11/16/2014 12:46

As a former network tech, here are a few tools I use for diagnostics.

Another poster recommended doing a ping at www.sawhawgz.com - great idea. This shows that your computer is talking to the internet and can translate www.sawhawgz.com into a usable IP address.

My preferred first step does almost exactly the same thing, however, the screen shows a few more details. From a cmd prompt, I use nslookup. The format you type in to check your site would be as follows: nslookup www.sawhawgz.com

You can follow that up with a trace route which will show you if there are any hang-ups to time-outs while your computer's trying to get to sawhawgz. The format for this tool again begins with a cmd prompt: tracert www.sawhawgz.com

The result will show you every router/server your computer "touches" in getting to sawhawgz.

A technical geek may also look up problem hops reported from the nslookup with http://itools.com/tool/arin-whois-domain-search - which tells you who owns any IP address.

I am regularly checking my DNS speed - how fast your computer can convert web-sites into an IP address. A slow DNS server will make your computer seem slow. Most computer systems will have at least two DNS servers in it's IPconfig. The tool I use is a freebie from Google: https://code.google.com/p/namebench/ - it will do a pretty thorough job of checking out your connectivity and offer up ways to speed up your DNS.