Knowledge Base
PingPlotter and MultiPing with Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows 2008 and 2012
Question
Do PingPlotter and MultiPing work with Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows 2008, 2012?
Solution
In general, all versions of PingPlotter and MultiPing work well under most versions of Windows (you can find PingPlotter's system requirements here), but there are some caveats and limitations in some cases.
UDP packets on PingPlotter Standard and PingPlotter Pro
Starting with PingPlotter v4.11.1, we’ve overhauled the UDP engine to allow things to work right “out of the box” - so you shouldn’t require any additional setup on your machine to use this packet type.
If you’re using an older version of PingPlotter (pre v4.11.1), then you’ll need to take a few additional steps to get things working. We’ve got a knowledge base article that provides some step by step instructions that should get things up and running.
TCP packets on PingPlotter Standard and PingPlotter Pro
TCP packets require the WinPCap library (version 4.0 or higher is recommended), and to interface with WinPCap on 7/2008/Vista, the current versions of PingPlotter must be running as Administrator. If you right-click on the PingPlotter icon and launch with the 'Run as Administrator' option, then TCP packets should work fine. Once you've done this once, then the WinPCap driver will be running and future launches of PingPlotter can be done as a normal user (until you reboot). Launching without administrative rights (the first time after a reboot) will cause an error to appear above the graph: 'pcap_open: PacketGetAdapterNames: The data area passed to a system call is too small.' - this error is misleading, it's really an access rights error.
If you often find yourself using the TCP packet type, you can automatically start the WinPCap driver at boot so you don't have to run PingPlotter as an administrator. To see information on how to do this, visit the WinPCap faq and look at question 18.
Running as a service with PingPlotter
Running as an interactive service has changed significantly with Windows Vista/7/8/10/2008/2012. You can absolutely still run PingPlotter as a Windows service, but if you're using PingPlotter Pro version 4 (or older), there are a few caveats you'll want to be aware of, which we cover here.