Monitoring the Internet connection can be helpful in several situations including troubleshooting an Internet connection or ensuring that the bandwidth usage does not go beyond a set limit. The free software Bitmeter II is a bandwidth meter that can be used for exactly that purpose. It will monitor the bandwidth usage of all network adapters as long as it is running by default, a setting that can be changed in the program’s options so that only selected network adapters are monitored.
The program runs quietly in the system tray using an icon that displays the incoming and outgoing activity of the system. A click on the icon displays a small overlay window that floats on the screen. This window displays a traffic graph and the download and upload bandwidth in Kilobytes.
The bandwidth meter can be resized and will display information about the bandwidth usage up to each second. More interesting than that are the statistics that are generated automatically. The statistics display the bandwidth usage of the last few hours, days and month in graphs.
A click on any of the grid icons in the left corner of the statistics will open a grid view of the traffic statistics which are easier to read than the graphs.
The options of the bandwidth meter can be used to configure several additional features of the program besides the already mentioned selection of the network adapters. This includes configuring notifications that inform the user if a certain transfer speed is reached. It is also possible to configure so called ISP restrictions which can be used to set traffic limits that will alert the user if that traffic limit is reached. This is helpful if the traffic has been limited by the ISP.
Another interesting feature is the traffic calculator that can be used to calculate how long it takes to download a file of a given size or how much can be downloaded in a given time period.
Other available settings contain web proxy support, data backups, running a web server to display the traffic details or running a stopwatch.
Bitmeter II is a sophisticated bandwidth meter that is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 1.1 or higher to be installed on the computer system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website. (thanks Crodol for the tip).
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There are other similar Bandwidth Monitors that I have used in the past (DuMeter and recently NetMeter) but what I like about BitMeter is that you can look at the statistics HOURLY!
So you can finally find out when the ISP stops throttling the speeds without staying up all night and watching the graphs…
I prefer Networx, have all feature that other miss.
Yeah, I use the same.
I use networx which has a lot of tools
shows app connection and dial-up can be saved to file
hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, custom shown in simple graphs below the tables and at a glance summary table of all
data exportable to a file
Trace route based on the ip
Can set a Quota
Speed meter, shows real time DL an UL speed if you hover over the icon in the tray (gd to look out for suspicious behavior)
supported in several languages
Quite gd and its free
I am always curious about the footprint of these mentioned applications — having low to medium needs for sophisticated network traffic data analysis.
I’ve been using Netmeter for years, but I gave a fair shot and compared memory footprints.
Here is my readout on Win XP SP3 with 3GB RAM:
netmeter ……………. 5,436 k
networx ……………… 13,128 k
bitmeter………………. 15,xxx k to 25,xxx k
I’ll stick to NetMeter for now.
Thanks for the bitmeter review and other comments, guys.
I prefer to use ProteMac Meter.
I have tried ProteMAc Meter. It is really good software.