Raymond.CC Blog

Today I am going to share with you a simple but useful tip for Windows which I’ve just learned. Many of us are already using fast broadband connection and this is fairly important to know when there is an error in sending or receiving packets. If there is always error in sending packets but none in receiving, most likely you have a bad network card.

Error information can be an important first step in troubleshooting a connection. You can view a network connection’s status, connection duration, speed, and packets sent and received for the connection by double-clicking the status icon on the system tray. You can also display the Status dialog box by double-clicking the connection’s icon in the Network And Dial-Up Networking folder. But the Status dialog box by default doesn’t display errors for the connection.

Before using sophisticated or tough to use packet sniffer to detect packet loss and error, you can just enable a hidden setting in Windows to show you errors in your connection. Here’s how to do it with a quick registry change and the information will be added to the status dialog box.


Before proceeding, I’d like to warn you that modifying the registry can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. So please follow the instructions carefully.

1. Go to Start > Run and type regedit.

2. Navigate to the following registry location
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\Connections\StatMon
If StatMon is not there, right click on Connections, select New > Key and enter the value as StatMon.

3. Inside StatMon key, set the ShowLanErrors DWORD value as 1.
If ShowLanErrors is not there, right click at the right pane New > DWORD value. Set the DWORD value as ShowLanErrors. Double click at ShowLanErrors and set the value data as 1.

4. Restart your computer to take effect. You will now see an additional Errors information in your connection status.

To turn error count off, just set the ShowLanErrors DWORD value as 0. Microsoft claims that because most users do not need this information and might find it confusing or misleading, error counts do not appear by default. I think that this is useful in diagnosing the network reliability and should be enabled by default.

When connected via VPN, the connection status window also shows the error. I guess as long as you have a connection that goes through your network interface card (NIC), it will show the error information. I am not sure about USB ADSL modem… Can anyone with USB ADSL modem share or confirm with me whether the error information shows or not when connected via USB modem?

Update: I’ve tested and it is working on XP and Vista. If you couldn’t get it right, just download this registry file and run it to import to your registry. No reboot required.