Troubleshooting Your Internet Connection

	Have you ever logged on to the Internet and were not able to go to a particular site? You called Technical Support and they told you that it was not your nor their fault? But you were still curious as to what the problem was right? Here are two neat utilities that will help give you an idea of how slow or fast the connections are between your computer and the computer that you are trying to reach on the internet.
	The utilities are PING and TRACERT. Both of these utilities show you how fast or slow the Internet is from your computer to the computer that you are trying to reach. Ping will tell you if the computer is responding and TRACERT will find exactly where the problem is if you can't get that Web page you need. These utilities are run from the Command Prompt in Windows 95. To get there, click Start, Programs then MS-DOS Prompt. In Windows 3.1, you will need to download a ping and tracert utility.
	To better explain what a PING is, suppose that you called one of your friends in Alaska and you live in Texas. If your friend stays silent for some time, you ask, "Are you there?", and your friend should reply with, "I'm here!". That was a human to human ping. The PING command is very similar for two computers. All you are going to do, is ask the other computer if he is still there.
Try It!	C:\>ping www.iflyswa.com Pinging www.iflyswa.com [204.32.16.10] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 204.32.16.10: bytes=32 time=836ms TTL=242 Reply from 204.32.16.10: bytes=32 time=775ms TTL=242 Request timed out. Reply from 204.32.16.10: bytes=32 time=729ms TTL=242
Explanation	As you can see, this site responded to three out of the four requests that it was sent. So this site is up and running. Now for a little explanation of what you see. The bytes mean how much data was received back from this particular server. The time means how long that it took to reach you. And the TTL (time to live) means how long that data that you sent is kept in memory of the computer that you are trying to reach.
	On the other hand, this is what you would see from a site that is not responding: C:\>ping www.microsoft.com Pinging www.microsoft.com [207.68.156.52] with 32 bytes of data: Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out.
	When you get the "request timed out", the next thing to do is run a tracert. This will tell you where the problem is.
	The other utility that comes in handy is tracert (Trace Route) which does just that. It traces the route that it takes to get to the computer that you are trying to reach. This utility tells shows you each router your packets cross when trying to reach your destination.
Try It!	C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>tracert www.tele-optics.com Tracing route to www.tele-optics.com [208.147.238.131] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms 1 ms 2 ms well1.mounet.com [206.151.76.1] 2 92 ms 54 ms 99 ms border6-serial1-6.Washington.cw.net [204.70.76.2 9] 3 70 ms 51 ms 55 ms core2-fddi-1.Washington.cw.net [204.70.74.65] 4 63 ms 78 ms 81 ms bordercore4.Atlanta.cw.net [166.48.56.1] 5 122 ms 98 ms 89 ms mountai-net.Atlanta.cw.net [166.48.56.30] 6 117 ms 111 ms 62 ms www.tele-optics.com [208.147.238.131] Trace complete.
Explanation	This tells you the route that it took to get to the computer that you were trying to reach. The first number is the "hop" number or router number that the route takes. The next three numbers are the round-trip times in milliseconds for three tries to reach that router. The last column is the hostname of the responding system. We hope that this will help ease your thoughts about the traffic on the internet. So when you get a slow connection one of these days, try out the PING and TRACERT utilities and it will give you an idea of how busy the lines are between your computer are and the computer that you are trying to reach.