First things first – How to take a screenshot
To take a screenshot, press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, it may appear as “prt sc” or “prt scrn”. This will automatically save the screenshot to your ‘Screenshots folder’ or wherever you have configured it to save.
In order to test connectivity and latency, we can instruct your computer to send and receive small amounts of data to one of Google’s servers, and to the equipment at your accommodation (these are called pings). For this we can use an application called Command Prompt, which is installed on your computer by default.
Performing a Ping test:
1. Click the start menu icon and search for ‘CMD’
2. Right click the ‘Command Prompt’ application and ‘Run as Administrator’ You will need to open two of these windows.
3. Line up the windows side by side and enter the following commands, one in each window:
First window:ping google.co.uk -n 100
Second window:ping gw -n 100
Press Enter to start the command in each window.
4. Allow all 100 pings to be completed. You will know when the test is finished as the text will stop
scrolling and you will see the words “ping statistics“.
5. Take a screenshot of the results, without cropping the image so that we can see the time stamp
6. Send the result to support@ask4.com together with any other tests requested, and mentioning your issue reference number
Your screenshot should look something like below:
We then need to take a screenshot of an Internet speed test.
To do this, first go to www.speedtest.net and click “Begin Test”.
After a few moments, it will present you with a result similar to the below image:
Please take a screenshot of this.
Next, the command that we would like you to run is “pathping google.co.uk” (without the quotes).
Once it finishes, it will display the following information. Please take a screenshot of this:
Finally, we will next need you to do a prolonged download test to show us what speeds you can achieve in a typical real world file download.
To do this first head to the thinkbroadband website here.
www.thinkbroadband.com/download
You should then see the “Very Large File – 1 GB – (1,024 MB)” download test file.
All you need to do is right click on the red “1GB (v.large)” icon for the file and click “Save as…” and begin downloading it to your computer.
The final part of this test involves taking a screenshot of the rate at which this file is downloaded in your browser.
To obtain this information, navigate to the Downloads within your browser. This will display the download rate, with a unit of “MB/s” or “KB/s”. Please take a screenshot of this number (it should appear something like the below image):
Sending Your Screenshots
Take a screenshot of your whole screen, so that the time is visible in the bottom right corner.
We require this screenshot to be taken from the location in which you experience the problem.
The screenshots should be saved to your desktop as .PNG or .JPG files. These need emailing to the ASK4 Support team so that they can be analysed further. To do so, please send an email to the following address: support@ask4.com
Required information (please put this in the body of the email):
- Your full name
- Your building name, address and block/flat/room number
- Your contact number (optional)
- Your ASK4 username (optional)
- Your ASK4 issue reference number