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).

ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter is a small lightweight network bandwidth monitor for Windows operating systems that monitors the traffic of selected network adapters in real-time. The bandwidth monitor displays a small always on top window by default which displays the the current bandwidth usage as well as that of the day and the month in either Megabyte or Gigabyte.

The transparency of the window can be changed and it can be moved freely around on the computer screen. The last available option is a window that is showing the bandwidth usage per month separated into download, upload and total.

The network bandwidth monitor uses roughly six Megabytes of computer memory when running in the Windows System Tray. The display of the bandwidth meter window does not change that number noticeably.

Netlimiter 2 Monitor is a sweet software that displays all open processes and applications on the system detailing their incoming and outgoing bandwidth along with ports, IP addresses and process numbers. That’s basically the same amount of information that my previous favorite Currports is displaying.

The first difference is that Netlimiter Monitor has a history function where it is displaying which applications connected to the Internet before on your system. Great for quickly checking out if an app is among the list that should not be there.

It’s definitely a great application if you want to evaluate the bandwidth usage of a process or software. I used it to keep an eye on Skype to see if my computer was used as a Skype supernode.

The Pro version of Netlimiter adds some interesting functions like Traffic Shaping, Network support, Network Tools like Whois and Traceroute, Remote Administration and Advanced Rules.