User Guide

Getting Started

Your first five minutes with Network Weather

Network Weather watches your network all day from the system tray. When something goes wrong, it tells you what broke and where.

Installing

Download the latest MSIX from the releases page and double-click it. The App Installer opens, you click Install, and Network Weather appears in the Start menu a few seconds later.

If you're rolling out across a fleet (Intune, SCCM, GPO, or PowerShell provisioning), see the Windows Deployment guide instead.

Requirements: Windows 11 (build 22621+), x64, WebView2 runtime (already included on Windows 11). No admin rights needed for a per-user install.

First launch

When you open Network Weather the first time, it walks you through a short onboarding:

  1. Welcome — Accept the terms of service and privacy policy.
  2. Quick quiz — Tell it what bothers you most: video calls, gaming lag, WiFi drops, etc. This shapes what the app pays attention to.
  3. First scan — It runs a one-time scan of your network: gateway, WiFi environment, DNS, services. Takes about 20 seconds.
  4. What you get — A short tour of the app before you land in the main window.

You can skip the quiz, but the first scan is required. It's how the app learns your network.

The four tabs

Network Weather is organized into a left sidebar with four tabs:

Tab What it does
Scan Run a Quick or Deep scan on your current network. Shows recent scan history.
Insights Prioritized list of issues found across your scans, with a count badge for unresolved items.
Status Live network map: device → WiFi/Ethernet → router → ISP → services. Shows current health.
Settings Launch at login, build info, feedback, log folder, version, check for updates.

The Status tab dot turns green, yellow, or red based on overall network health, so you can tell at a glance if anything's wrong without opening the tab.

The Scan tab gets a small blue dot whenever you join a network you haven't scanned yet, nudging you to run one.

The system tray icon

Network Weather lives in the Windows system tray (the icon area near the clock, lower-right). Click it to open the main window. Right-click for a quick menu: Open, Launch at Login, Check for Updates, Quit.

The tray icon will eventually change color based on overall network health (green/yellow/red); today it's a single static icon with notifications surfacing through Windows toasts.

Learning what "normal" looks like

For the first few minutes after install, the app shows "Establishing baseline" while it runs a few rounds of measurements. Once it knows what your network usually looks like, it can spot deviations quickly.

This takes about four or five minutes. After that, it runs quietly in the background.

Battery life

Network Weather measures more often when you're plugged in (every 5 seconds), less often on battery (every 15 seconds), and minimally when the app is in the background (every 60 seconds). You don't need to configure this — it adapts automatically.

Where things live

What Path
Logs %LOCALAPPDATA%\NetworkWeather\Logs\
Configuration %LOCALAPPDATA%\NetworkWeather\config.json
Stored credentials (encrypted via DPAPI) %LOCALAPPDATA%\NetworkWeather\credentials.ini

The Settings tab has an Open button next to the log folder if you need to grab logs for support.

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