Someday we'll pick peppermint off the trees and sip lemonade from the streams on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. About that same time we'll all have direct connections to the Internet, and all web pages will pop up before you can say Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the World Wide Web in 1990).

Meanwhile, we must poke and prod our PCs in a futile effort to track down what's causing our favorite web page to dangle tantalizingly at 17 pct. completion, teasing us into thinking it'll be there any second now. There's no one thing that makes the Internet move like molasses running uphill. It wasn't designed for millions of users, the phone lines are lousy, your modem's too slow, your ISP's out to lunch and the web server at www.charmingbilly.com goes into overload after two hits.

Your Internet setup needs to lie down on a couch, get its head shrunk, and say confession. But where can you find an Internet shrink who charges under $30 for unlimited sessions?

I found one: Net.Medic, by VitalSigns software. Net.Medic not only diagnoses your Internet neuroses, but suggests cures, and can sometimes even fix traumas automagically. If all that doesn't help, it may offer to send a note to your ISP or webmaster telling him to straighten up and fly right.

Net.Medic installs in your Win 9x/NT startup group, appearing in the system tray next to the clock. Double-clicking it brings up a dashboard, with panes that graphically display everything from the number of hops (routers) between you and your ISP and between your ISP and a web site, to the speed of your connection, average and actual throughput, percentage of cache hits, and many other informative measurements.

I especially like the ticker tape that streams real-time information about your current connection: the web site you're visiting, the number of times you've visited it, its size, estimated pct. of delay caused by the network, among other things. One pane shows modem performance, amount of compression and speed. A bank of lights shows green, yellow or red, indicating from good to poor health. If your modem is not using compression to speed transfers, an AutoCure feature can enable it.

If you're loading a web site with an unresponsive server, Net.Medic re-initiates requests, reducing time-outs. It maintains a health log and several kinds of summaries so you can check your ISP's performance over time or at different times of day; or see which sites are always slow, or when they are.

I found Net.Medic was occasionally confused by my frequent switching between several ISPs, and sometimes identified my home network as an Intranet, but these are not things most users will encounter.

You can select your favorite measurement pane, or the ticker tape, to be docked into the top of your browser, providing a steady flow of information to help you take appropriate action to optimize performance. When I'm in deep analysis mode I size my Netscape window to float on top of Net.Medic's dashboard, which I keep in horizontal format. Or you can switch back and forth.

Download a trial version at www.vitalsigns.com and start shedding your Internet psychodramas.

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