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Charon is (as always, in my opinion) the best overall proxy checker you can get your hands on. It’s free, it does the job better than pretty much any other tool except arguably AAtools (which you have to pay for), and it runs cleanly without any extra hassle. Just go over your settings, paste in your list, and it’s off and running. It does both HTTP and Socks, Internal or External Judging, and has a great filtering system. And this is how you run it:

Download: http://www.ewhore.biz/program_downloads/Charon.zip

You don’t have to install it, just unzip the folder and get to work. Click the cartoon bull and you’ll see this:

This is the main screen. On the first run, you just want to go down the list and configure all your settings at once. After this you really don’t have to go in there very often if at all, except to change the Filters or check the Judges from time to time.

Nothing much to see here, the settings should (from what I recall) be fine as default. If you have something different, reference this picture and fix it. Skipping scan options (we’re just using the check function), we get:

My personal opinion is that you should use the internal judge. You can guarantee then that it won’t suddenly become overloaded and start giving out cached results, or won’t go down mid-test … plus a few other potential benefits.

This is flavour country. Your own IP address should be at the top, and you’ll want to select “External Judge”. This lets you use a judge script outside your own box, which prevents all manner of problems and ensures a more accurate test. For threads and time-out you’ll want somewhere between 15-30 generally, until you get more comfortable with what we’re doing here and your own system’s preferable setup. Threads is the amount of connections the checker can open at once while running through the list, and timeout is the amount of time it waits until it decides an IP is no good and the response is never coming. Retry is of course how many chances it gives an IP before it gives up and declares it Dead.

Depending on if you’re running a check at that moment for HTTP, Socks, or just a hodgepodge list of both, you can deselect “Check proxies for HTTP” or “Check proxies for Socks” so as to ensure the checker won’t waste any time when you already know what type the IPs you have are. Also, provided your system can run proxies on nonstandard ports (anything besides 1080 for Socks) there’s no sense in not unchecking the “Limit proxies to ports” button.

For check against, you just want a site that will always be up. I prefer google.

The filter options are a list of IPs and wilcards that will pre-remove IPs you don’t want from your list. The ones that come with Charon are solid, though there’ve been two solid improvements made recently that you should include:

http://www.dcsproxy.com/proxy-tools/2294-planetlab-codeen-filter-exclusion-list.html This is an updated Planetlab filter, just copy the text and overwrite it with what’s in your file.

http://www.dcsproxy.com/proxy-tools/11244-more-proxies-exclude.html This is a list of UniqueInternetServices (makers of Proxyfirewall) IPs which may show up on your lists but will not be usable by you. To add this you must create a new filter file. Just open notepad, copy all the IPs in the above post, and paste them into the notepad file. Save it as “UniqueInternetServices.ini” and place it into the filterfiles folder in your charon folder and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to restart Charon and select it.

This is what was mentioned previously, about “External Judges”. The Judges in question are all external scripts hosted on other people’s servers, they check your IP and see if you’re being properly masked by it or not. The list that comes with Charon is rather old by now, go to this wonderful post http://www.dcsproxy.com/proxy-tools/1700-proxy-judges.html and select all of the judges labeled “AZ Environment variables 1.04″. Read the post as well, it’ll help.
After copying the judges, right-click the Proxy Judges window in Charon and select “Paste judges from clipboard. When that’s sorted, click “Remove Duplicates” and then “Test Judges”. You want to use the single most reliable and low-pinging azenv1.04 judge on the list, so find whichever one that is for you right-click it from the bottom list to the top. Just one, and Azenv1.04, remember.

Well about now you’re pretty much done. Go to the left menu, click “Check anonymity of all proxies” and go make yourself a sandwich, your part is over. When the checker is done running through the IP list you’ll have your very own list of personalized, guaranteed-up proxies.