Have you ever wondered just how exactly your information gets from one point on the internet to another? Is there any way to actually see what machines your packets of information go through? Of course, those smart guys back in the good old days made a utility called 'traceroute' that would, trace the route of your packets (kind of strange how the name actually says what it does, eh?). Of course, it was command line and slow... Until now!

AnalogX HyperTrace is a graphical version of traceroute, but we didn't just stop there! AnalogX HyperTrace is also faster, and I'm not just talking about a little bit; in most instances it's 20-30x faster! So how do you use this marvel of modern technology? Simple, just load up the program, type in the machine you're trying to connect to (like 'www.analogx.com'), and hit 'Trace'. It goes into action, displaying how many machines (or hops) the packet must to through, the hops IP address, machine name (if available), and even how fast the response is from that particular machine! It's very handy for seeing how fast your ISP's connection is, or the connection of the other host; it's also great for debugging problems connecting with other sites, since you can see exactly where the data goes.

In the 'Config' dialog, you can change some of the trace route options... 'DNS Lookup' means it will convert the IP address of each hop into it's respective machine name; this is the most time consuming phase of performing a trace route, so some users prefer to turn this off. Next is 'Packet Loss', this means that HyperTrace will start measuring how many packets it's able to send after it has completed the trace routine; this will continue until you press 'Abort'.

A quick note on the value of Packet Loss; this can in many instances show you where a network problem may lie, so if you see that on your 7th hop, you have 50% packet loss, then it's pretty fair to say that's where your problem lies. It's important to note that in the above example, if the 7th hop has 50% packet loss, then it's fairly safe to assume all subsequent hops will have high packet loss as well - this is more than likely the fault of hop 7.