what is meant by ping?

This basically means that you are trying to check whether the remote machine (that hosts a website) is up and running or not?

Is it responding to your requests or not.

TTL is time to leave -nothing to do with your net speed.

response time has something to do with the speed of your internet connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping

Ping is sending a message to another computer asking "are you there". It tells how much time it has taken (time=) and the number of bytes it has sent (bytes=) and the "time to live" (TTL=) of the message.

The black window is in fact a command-line window, in which you can type all kinds of weird & wonderful things like "DIR" or "CD" or "Echo I should really learn about DOS"

No, what that is doing is "pinging" that specific port on your system.

Pinging is bad unless it's being done by a reputable company like Microsoft, your ISP, or your anti-virus/anti-spyware service provider.

Basically what "pinging" does is marks that port so that whenever either general or specific information is transmitted via that port, another system is being alerted and is picking up the content being transmitted. It's used to track your system use, either by reputable companies you are subcribed to or for spyware/malware programs so they can trash your system or send you specific spyware that it feels would interest you.

Best thing to do is set your ping settings so that if something's trying to ping you, you get a notice of it and you can decide whether to allow the ping or not. That can be set through your firewall settings and/or your router settings.

Hope this helps.

Ping is a method of testing the reliability of your ip address as well as the integrity of your ethernet card.

A protocol that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

PING!