Freeware Tools: ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter 1.4

ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter runs in the system tray and displays the current, daily and monthly bandwidth usage for selected network adapters. You can limit monitoring to certain periods during the day, adjust transparency of the meter display, and also choose to disable Flash and images in Internet Explorer. It's a useful tool if you have a limited Internet connection and need to keep track of your bandwidth usage. The program displays a small popup screen with current traffic statistics, today's and this month's figures and more info is available via the icon in the taskbar.

ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter is an application that helps you monitor Internet traffic and view statistics for a user-defined period of time.

The program displays a small popup screen with current traffic statistics, today's and this month's figures, but more information is accessible via the icon placed in the Windows System Tray.

You can for example see the monthly totals, with separate details for each month of the year, but also customize the aforementioned popup screen and see the traffic information in kilobytes or megabytes.

It's recommended to have a look in the settings menu as well because it lets you configure the network interfaces to monitor, a very useful option especially if there are multiple network adapters installed on your computer.

Plus, you're allowed to configure the month start day and an interval to disable traffic monitoring, especially useful to those who have unlimited data plans during the night.

Of course, since ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter is such an easy to use application, it doesn't hamper system performance at all, remaining fairly light on hardware resources all the time.

In addition, it works just fine on all Windows versions on the market, but administrator privileges are required on Windows 7 in order to monitor specific network adapters.

Overall, it's pretty clear that ShaPlus Bandwidth Meter can come in handy to many users out there and thanks to its intuitive interface it can be installed by both beginners and those with a bit more computer knowledge. There is no help file, but it's almost impossible to get lost in its features.