Bandwidth Meter Pro

The Bandwidth Meter Pro application’s functionality caters to a very specific need: the need to keep an eye on your bandwidth usage. The application displays bandwidth usage in real time, monitors your bandwidth and presents daily, weekly and monthly usage reports, helps you test download and upload speeds, and notifies you when you exceed a certain bandwidth usage limit.

The Bandwidth Meter Pro installation file weighs in at a very lightweight 1.2MB. It will take little of your time to get the application off the web and onto your computer, and so will take installing it on your Windows-powered machine. Bandwidth Meter Pro works with any 32 or 64-bit Windows edition from Windows 98 up to Windows 7.

The first time you run Bandwidth Meter Pro, you will be presented with the “Take a Tour” section of the application’s Help file. On top of that a new icon will appear in the system tray and the Bandwidth Meter Pro main window will show up. The main window, which you can drag and drop to any location on the screen, monitors your connections and displays your download and upload rates in real time.

You can customize the way Bandwidth Meter Pro’s interface looks. From the Options menu (right click the main window or the system tray icon and select Options, or just press the F2 hotkey) you can choose what you want to see in the main window (graph, average download line, kilobits per second, other things of the sort) and you can change the graph colors and the text font.

From the same Options menu you can set up notifications for when you exceed a certain bandwidth usage threshold. The application can play a sound that you specify, play a beep, send an email notification to multiple email addresses, and even run a program. Another interesting bit in the Options menu is that you can enable Bandwidth Meter Pro to run as a service.

I mentioned above that Bandwidth Meter Pro displays bandwidth usage reports. To access them, right click on the application’s window or system tray icon, then select Reports from the menu. You will be presented with a general summary, daily, weekly, and monthly reports. You can export the traffic reports or clear them.

I also mentioned above that Bandwidth Meter Pro helps test download and upload speed. It does that via its Stopwatch feature. Access the Stopwatch, hit start, and the application will start testing the speed of your broadband connection.

Unfortunately, Bandwidth Meter Pro is not freeware, it is only free to try. You have 30 days at your disposal to use the application for free and test out its functionality. You will have to get a license if you want to keep using the application once the trial period is over.

Bandwidth Meter Pro is an easy to use and good looking tool that helps you manage and monitor your bandwidth usage.