The network software works best with either the freely available WinPcap Capture Driver or Microsoft’s Network Monitor Driver. Both driver downloads are linked on the official program page. Users need to have at least one of the drivers installed to make full use of the software.

NetworkTrafficView supports a Raw Sockets method as well which unfortunately is not as reliable as using one of the network monitor drivers.

Some Windows users need to run the network monitoring software with elevated rights. This was for instance the case on my 64-bit Windows 7 Professional PC system, as no network adapter is discovered by the program otherwise.

The program afterwards displays the network traffic in realtime in the application interface. This includes the IP protocol, source and destination address, ports as well as packet information, the process and the total data site transferred.

A click on the stop button pauses the capturing for the time being. A search is provided to find specific items in the listing.

The listings are fully sortable with a click on the column headers. It is for instance possible to sort by process, destination address or data size.

NetworkTrafficView comes with the usual assortment of features, including the ability to create a HTML report and to export the current selection as txt, xml or csv files.

I rarely think that Nirsoft software lacks a feature. This time though I’d like to see a filtering option to filter traffic directly while it is captured. This way you could monitor a specific process or only data packets above a certain size in the interface.

NetworkTrafficView is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Windows users can download it and the necessary capture drivers from the Nirsoft website.

One way of dealing with this situation is to run a traffic balancer to ensure that the other activities are not affected by the downloads or uploads.

Netbalancer (via To The PC) is not limiting the bandwidth of the applications directly. It is instead changing the network priority of applications to control the Internet traffic. The network priority of a software that is demanding lots of bandwidth would be reduced by Netbalancer to ensure that other applications with a higher priority get their share of the bandwidth.

By default all network priorities are set to normal and it is up to the user to modify them. This usually means that applications like P2P clients, ftp clients or others that download and upload files continuously are reduced from normal to low. It could also mean to raise the network priority of an application to high to prioritize it.

The main interface looks similar to a process viewer. It displays all running processes of the computer system, their priority, incoming and outgoing traffic, the number of connections and additional information.

A right-click on any row will bring up a menu with options to change the network priority of a process or to allow or block its Internet traffic completely. There is also a handy button in the toolbar for all of these options plus the ability to block all network traffic.

A severity level can be configured in the options. The speed difference between low, normal and high priority can be set. Netbalancer might be the right application for users who regularly download or upload data while working with other applications that need bandwidth as well.

The actual capturing process does not start before the user clicks on the Start button of the application. Another possibility would be to load a previously saved session which can be displayed as well in the interface. The network traffic will be captured continuously until the user decides to stop the capturing process.

Filters can be used to narrow down the results. About 25 default filters are available like filtering by IPv4 addresses but the user can also define his own filters. Each frame is displayed listing the process name, source and destination IP, protocol name and description. Another pane is displaying details about the currently selected frame.

The network monitor runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the selected operating systems.