IP2 is a nice freeware program that uses servers on the internet to ping your ip address and tells you what your ip address and hostname are from the outside as well as showing you your LAN ip address and hostname if you have a network. This can be useful information if you have a dynamic ip address or are testing a proxy server to see what the ip is showing up as. You can get more information at the author's website and click the download link below to try the program.

Visual Ping is a simple pinging utility that gives you a visual indication of ping response times. You can set the time out, packet size, pause between packets, and the number of loops. It should be noted that you can do basically the same thing in DOS by using the ping  -t to continuously ping an ip address. (Example: ping  -t 192.168.0.2) I found this program particularly useful when testing WiFi cards on laptops. Click the download link below to try the program.

NCH Tone Generator is a nice little freeware program that lets you generate many different types of audio tones using your computer's sound card. You can select from 1 to 16 different tones to run simultaneously in mono or stereo. Sine, square, triangular, sawtooth, impulse, white noise and pink noise can be selected as well with individual time durations. This program is great for testing the acoustic qualities of a room if played through your stereo. You can save your custom made tones to a .wav file format on your computer. I made a sound file similar to the old Emergency Broadcast Systems tones that used to be played as a test on television in the 1960's and 70's, by mixing a 853 Hz and 960 Hz sine waves together. Click the example wave file to listen.

WavePad is a sound editing program that is designed so anyone can use it. You can edit audio recordings with the intuitively designed user interface. Some features are cut, copy, paste, delete sections of audio and use different filtering effects to edit a sound file. This program supports different sound file formats and has many more features you have to try for yourself to appreciate.