SmartSniff

SmartSniff is a general-purpose network sniffer for Windows operating systems. It can be used to sniff the traffic that goes through your network.

There is a variety of uses for such an application. Some people use it to read IMs from other users on the same network or to analyze traffic and improve the security of the network.

SmartSniff uses three different capture drivers to capture packets: Raw Sockets, WinPcap Packet Capture Driver, and Network Monitor driver. The first method worked very well for me. I was able to capture quite a few network packets. When I was trying this tool, I was also downloading a file from another computer, and the sniffer detected all the packets going to that computer and it even displayed how much data I was downloading. The WinPcap driver didn't really work well, but I am unsure as to the reason for this. I have had success with it in the past for MSN sniffing. When I tried it, it only got packets that originated in the computer the sniffer was installed on, and it rarely got packets for or from other computers.

SmartSniff doesn't really format the packets to make them easy to read for beginner users. It displays all the information contained in them, which makes it ideal as a serious packet analysis tool. It has good export options as well.