If you are a customer of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who is monitoring your bandwidth usage, a useful tool for you is a bandwidth meter. While most of you out there will probably never run into issues with bandwidth limitations, inevitably some of you will. To help watch your usage, check out NetMeter.
NetMeter is a free bandwidth monitoring tool which watches both your upload and download usage. There are lots of options you can configure such as the color and font scheme as well as which network cards you want to watch (in the event you have more than one). Another handy feature is NetMeter can project your anticipated usage which may be attractive for those with limations.
For the most part, this utility is a good tool to have for those concerned about their net usage. Power users may find this an interesting toy to play with as well.
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Well now I don’t have too worry too much about whether i’m using too much bandwidth with Comcrap.
These kind of monitoring programs are great for a single user with a single computer connected to the Internet. These programs are useless for a home network with multiple computers behind a NAT router. They lump all the data transfers together and can not break out transfers between local machines and data flowing to/from the ISP.
Steve you are saying since I have my pc and another one on behind the same wireless router this program will lump the bandwidth usage of both together?
I myself use the HooTech NetMeter. The “free” version is only for a limited period; after which you have to buy it. BUT I did and I still use it on both comps.- 1 on each. To obtain the total bandwidth used I simply add the figures from the 2 together. (Other software may vary?)
There are quite a few “Net-Meters” available and more than one is free – However be very careful: The one Rich suggests is safe AFAIK, but there is another free “Net Meter” from Network-Tools and available for free download via Softpedia that was riddled with spyware when I checked it out some years ago. Ensure you don’t download that one instead.
Since I pay for unlimited traffic you may wonder why I’d use a meter. The truth is that I like to monitor what’s coming in and going out in realtime at times; so if I click a link, for example, and nothing happens immediately, I can just check the coloured readout to see if anything is actually happening despite nothing seeming to happen. You’d be rather surprised that internet activity ocurrs sometimes quite a while before the software responds to it; particularly in the case of IE6 and 7.
Perhaps I’m sad, overgeeked, or both? Whatever. (I remember when I used to watch the FAT32 defragmenter on Windows 98. I actually got to a point where I could predict its next move some of the time – Now that is sad! lol
I downloaded the one from his link so it should be safe but thanks for the heads up.