If you have to pay per Megabyte transferred or only have a limited amount of free traffic until you have to pay for additional Megabytes transferred then you might want to use a network bandwidth monitor to always have up to date traffic figures to avoid having to pay more than needed.
ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter is [...]
Network Bandwidth Monitor
Netlimiter 2 Monitor
Do you know which applications and processes connect to the Internet on your computer ? If you use a firewall chance is that you had to define rules to allow certain programs the right to connect to the Internet. Sometimes however users think of this as a burden and use low security settings to prevent [...]
