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Pathping is a helpful network utility that comes standard as part of the Windows operating system. It displays more detailed information than what is found in an ordinary trace route, especially regarding packet loss. As the term indicates, packet loss results from data packets not arriving to their destination, which can result in high latency or even disconnections.

Loading Command Prompt and discovering your realm's IP address

When playing World of Warcraft, press the Alt and Tab keys at the same time, the game will minimise and you will be returned to the Windows Desktop.

[ Windows XP ]

1. Click Windows Start menu button and then Run.
2. In Run box that has appeared; type cmd and press Enter.

[ Windows Vista or 7 ]

1. Click the Windows Start menu logo, navigate to (All) Programs and then Accessories.
2. In the Accessories menu, right-click on Command Prompt and left-click Run as administrator.

3. In the Command Prompt window, type netstat -n -p tcp -b | more and press Enter.

You will see many lines of text, the line we're interested in will look something like this:

TCP XXX.XX.XX.XX:XXXX YY.YYY.YYY.YY:3724 ESTABLISHED ZZZZ [WoW.exe]

The Y values are your realm's current IP address and will be needed when creating the pathping, the port number (e.g. :3724) is not needed.

Creating the pathping

In the Command Prompt window, type pathping YY.YYY.YYY.YY > C:\pathping.txt and press Enter.

IMPORTANT: Remember to replace the Y values with the numbers you saw when running the netstat command.

The command will take several minutes to complete, once Windows has finishing creating the file, you should be returned to a new command prompt. You can find the results of your pathping to your realm on the C: drive, in a file called pathping.txt .

You can return to the game by closing the Command Prompt window and clicking the minimised World of Warcraft window, found in the Windows taskbar.

Macintosh

While Mac OSX doesn't have a separate pathping application, its default trace route contains equivalent information. For assistance on how to perform a trace route on Mac OSX, please see this support article.

Reported!