NetworkCountersWatch review
NetworkCountersWatch is a free program for Microsoft Windows by popular developer Nirsoft that displays system counters and information for each network interface of the device.
The program comes with the usual Nirsoft software traits. It is tiny in size, and portable so that you may run it from any location on the system without installation. You do need to unpack it though as it is distributed as a zip archive.
The program itself is compatible with all versions of Windows starting with Windows Vista. It supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.
NetworkCountersWatch
The application lists all network adapters in its interface on start. Each adapter is listed with its name and description, and lots of information.
The program lists values of all network counters that Windows supports for each network adapter. These include information about packets with errors, discounted incoming packets, or the number of outgoing packets that were discarded.
It shows the total incoming and outgoing bytes on top of that, and lots of other data points. One interesting feature of the program is the ability to set all counters to zero; this can be useful right before you run tests for instance, or certain operations to find out how well they run.
Tap on the F7 key on the keyboard to reset the counters, or use the file menu instead if you prefer to use the mouse for that.
Since NetworkCountersWatch displays information about incoming and outgoing bytes, it may be used as a basic bandwidth monitor. While it won't save records at the end of sessions, it may provide you with an overview of the transferred bytes during sessions. The program does display the current download and upload speed as well. It uses the InOctets and OutOctets values to calculate the speed.
You may save some or all data. Either as a CSV, XML or text file, or as a HTML report.
Closing Words
NetworkCountersWatch is a specialized program for Windows. Its main purpose is to monitor specific network adapters. It may be useful if you need to diagnose Internet connectivity issues, and to a lesser degree to test the connectivity of certain connections or applications.
