As you’ll guess from its name, Advanced IP Scanner is a network scanner for Windows, which checks your network for connected devices and tells you more about them.

That doesn’t sound particularly interesting, especially as there are already so many similar tools around. But wait – Advanced IP Scanner does have some advantages which help it stand out from the crowd.

These start right after the download. Launch the setup program and you can install it as normal, but there’s also an option to run Advanced IP Scanner as a portable tool, convenient if you’d like to try it on someone else’s system.

All your network devices and resources are listed in the Results table

Ease of use is another plus. There’s no need to specify adapters, IP addresses ranges or masks; just click “Scan” and the program will detect and check each of your network adapters.

A simple Results table lists any detected hardware, its name, manufacturer, IP and MAC address. But it doesn’t stop there. Advanced IP Scanner also checks the ports of each device and finds HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and RDP resources, as well as shared folders. Double-clicking any of these will open the resource in your default client.

Right-clicking a device reveals even more options. You can remotely shut down or start a PC via Wake-On-Lan; there’s integration with the standard Ping, Tracert, Telnet and SSH tools; and if you’ve installed Radmin (a commercial remote administration tool from the same developer) then you’ll be able to access the system, control it and transfer files.

Finally, a convenient Favourites system makes it easy for you to save any remote devices which interest you. In future you’ll be able to scan just those, rather than the entire network.

Some of this is a little basic. If you use the right-click menu to “Ping” a PC, say, you might hope to see a graphical tool with more options. But all the program does is launch the regular console ping.exe, opening a command window to display its results.

This integration can still save you time, though, and on balance Advanced IP Scanner is a likeable tool, simple to operate, yet with handy bonus extras that more experienced users will appreciate.