These products are bandwidth meters that tell you how much traffic you've got on your PC's network connection, and therefore how much Net bandwidth you're using. In some cases they can tot it up for a monthly total, to see how near your ISP's limit you are. Another use is as a diagnostic tool, for connectivity problems; you can see precisely how much data you are pushing down the wire, and exactly when it fires up and cuts off.
NetMeter is skinny, fast to install, has an excellent graphical display, and does the job with no hassle. It has two display options, one of which should suit everyone. It's a simple bandwidth meter that has a good real-time graph of the action, and totals if you need them - perhaps for an ISP's monthly DSL bandwidth allocation check. The system tray icon can substitute for the graph, if you don't want to sacrifice screen real estate.
In the screenshot on the right, this is the small and neat bandwidth graph. I placed it at the lower right of the desktop, just above the System Tray. Here you can see a download usage of 33.9kB -- the vertical scale.
The only thing that could conceivably be improved here is that an average reading is sorely needed. All readings are those existing at that microsecond; but an averaged figure would be of much more use, since at any given moment the value might be 0 or 100k. A choice of averaging times would help - 10 seconds, 5 seconds, 1 second perhaps. All realtime stats readouts need an averaging feature.
BitMeter II from Codebox Software is a good alternative, if you have the Microsoft .NET package V1.1 already installed. It's a little more feature rich than NetMeter but uses a tad more of your PCs resources to deliver those features.
NET Traffic Meter is another candidate - feature wise this is closer to BitMeter II than NetMeter, and like BitMeter requires the dot-NET framework, though in this case V2.0 rather than 1.1. From the web site it appears development has ceased, but the product is still available from numerous download sites including this one.
What would be useful to many is a LAN-total network traffic meter - a widget to tell you what all the machines on your LAN are loading the DSL connection with. This, after all, is how many people are caught out on their ISP's bandwidth limit, since everyone in the house is caning the DSL. That, however, sounds like a job for a router plugin. A Linksys router might be the best candidate here, as they have 3rd-party developers like DD-WRT who provide custom firmware. On the other hand you can get a local network total like this by installing bandwidth meters on all machines; and if you use BWMeter (shareware), it can aggregate all the data and maintain a central total. This will do the job as long as you don't have a Mac or Linux machine on the LAN, since BWMeter is a Windows-only application; note that it's shareware so we haven't reviewed it here.
Product Specifications:
NetMeter
Website:http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/
Download link:
http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item14
Author: ReadError [sic]
Current version: 1.1.3
File Size: 616KB
License: Freeware, donations encouraged.
Operating Systems Supported: All 32 bit Windows versions .
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements: No
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : None
BitMeter II
Website:
http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2
Download link:
http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2
Author: Codebox software
Current version: 3.5.3
File Size: 1.0MB
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 2000, XP
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements: No
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : .NET 1.1 Framework
NET Traffic Meter
Website:
http://www.trafficmeter.be
Download link:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/nettrafficmeter.html
Author: Kevin Chabot
Current version: 2.1
File Size: 834MB
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: Windows NT, 2000, XP
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements: No
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : NET 2.0 Framework