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With robust features and a low cost,, packet analyzer is an excellent value
AS SOON AS something goes wrong in the deepest levels of your network, you have to fix it fast. Few companies can afford to let their IT staff dally when the network suddenly slows down, a new program crashes half of the servers, or the printers stop printing. EtherPeek 4.0 for Windows, from AG Group, is a software-based packet analyzer that lets technicians, programmers, or network managers immediately determine what is happening on their network at a very low level.
EtherPeek does a good job of analyzing network traffic from a Windows 95/98 or NT platform. it exposes the network hogs and what they are doing, which helps you determine whether or not the network load is a symptom of an easily resolved problem or if it requires an expensive upgrade.
Also, at $995, it costs much less than its competitors. Leading software-based products Network Associates Sniffer Basic and Novell LANalyzer for Windows cost $1,500 per copy. You can also choose from portable dedicated hardware products from many vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, which cost at least $11,000.
The extra money you would pay for a dedicated hardware solution buys a tool that won't lose data, a problem common to the softwarebased products, including EtherPeek. Also contributing to its score of Good is EtherPeek's strange dependency on the dated NE 2000 NIC (network interface card) to handle error monitoring. Nevertheless, EtherPeek's low price and great feature set offer the best value...