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f13.net General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: shiznitz on March 02, 2006, 06:15:26 AM



Title: Looking for software that measures bandwidth usage
Post by: shiznitz on March 02, 2006, 06:15:26 AM
Any free (or cheap) programs that keep track of bandwidth usage for a home PC?


Title: Re: Looking for software that measures bandwidth usage
Post by: Trippy on March 02, 2006, 06:38:14 AM
Any free (or cheap) programs that keep track of bandwidth usage for a home PC?
Be more specific. Are you trying to monitor your overall (total) usage or are you trying to monitor specific programs? Are you just trying to get a general sense how much you using or do you need numbers broken down by exact timeframes (by day, by hour, etc.)

At the simplest level Windows Task Manager can provide network utilization statistics if you setup the column display properly but that will only work if your Internet connection is also not used as your LAN connection otherwise your LAN traffic numbers will get mixed in with your Internet numbers.

I use a program called NetLimiter to allow me to manually limit the amount of bandwidth programs are taking (so I can, for example, download in the background and still play online games) and it also has some bandwidth usage tracking features and can track on an individual program basis though the version 1.3 that I'm using is somewhat limited in that regard. 2.0 supposedly has more features in that area but they were having stability issues with the betas and I haven't bothered to check out the release version since 1.3 is working fine for me. NetLimiter is also a commercial program which may not interest you.

Some cable/DSL modems and routers have traffic monitoring built-in that you can access through their admin interfaces.

A brief check through Goggle shows that there are other programs out there that will monitor your bandwidth though I don't know how good they are.


Title: Re: Looking for software that measures bandwidth usage
Post by: shiznitz on March 02, 2006, 07:19:22 AM
At best, I would like to know usage per app but what I really want is just a counter that runs like a stopwatch and will keep track of hourly, weekly, monthly, etc periods.


Title: Re: Looking for software that measures bandwidth usage
Post by: Trippy on March 02, 2006, 07:46:49 AM
Check the documentation for your router or modem to see if it can log statistics. You can also try the freeware version of NetLimiter called NetLimiter Monitor to see if that's sufficient:

http://www.netlimiter.com/


Title: Re: Looking for software that measures bandwidth usage
Post by: SurfD on March 02, 2006, 12:54:09 PM
Dont think it can do individual app tracking, but for general bandwidth usage, DUMeter (http://www.dumeter.com/) works very well for me.