I'm so sorry to bother you guys with some more no doubt obvious questions! I've been through most of the user guide and am just getting to grips with the software and wondering how it can assist me in my fight against my ISP for better speed!
I followed the instructions and just set up a trace on Google.co.uk and got the result attached.
It seems to be a 10 hop jump to google but the last 7 hops show packet losses ranging from 4% to 96% with several ERR's in the Cur column. The roundtrip figure has an average of 43 and a Cur of ERR. Can someone please tell me what the significance of ERR is, I cant seem to find it mentioned anywhere in the startup guide at all!
I've done quite a few traces now and pretty much all of them are like this with plenty of ERR's and lots of packet loss.
I do use Zone Alarm but I've disabled it for the tests and it doesn't seem to make any difference.


Can anyone please just point me in the right direction?!

Hello. When an ERR shows up in the Cur column, that means that the most recent sample in the sample set you're looking at was lost - and never returned. That's a lost packet, and shows up in the packet loss column.

We cover the values in our manual, here:

http://www.pingplotter.com/manual/standard/theinterfacegraphs.html

The screenshot you posted looks a bit like there's some underlying route changes (unfortunately, route changes are hard to represent well in a static screenshot like this).

We might be able to offer a bit more explicit advice if you email a .pp2 file (File -> Save Sample Set..., then attach it to an email to support@pingplotter.com) - which captures all the route changes. From there, we can look for patterns and post back some recommendations here.

Best wishes,
Pete