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Article Title: DU Meter - Keeping Your Internet Service Provider Off Your Back

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Software Articles
Times Read: 4230
Date: 2005-02-08 20:00:00
Pages: 1

I know by now at least some of you readers have received complaints from your ISPs regarding bandwidth usage. Especially if you live in Victoria, Bc, Canada. In the old days you could download to your hearts content (I've downloaded up to 323Gb in a single month), but things are about to change. Shaw was the pioneer of local monitoring, which in turn forced me to leave the service before they booted me off. At the time everyone was raving about Telus as being a great alternative, and was it ever. But these things come in cycles and now Telus is about to implement bandwidth restrictions, and even tighter then Shaw (unadvertised 30gb limit). The standard Telus 1.5Mbit account will have a quota of 10gb of traffic, and 2.5Mbit account will have be 20gb.

Some of you would be surprised at how much bandwidth you generate, especially if you use file sharing networks like Bit torrent, or use the news groups. At 280k/s (approximately 2.5Mbit) a connection can download 23gb / day. The average ADSL / Cable connection can upload between 50 - 85Kb/s which is around 5 - 8Gb. So to avoid being kicked off for excessive bandwidth usage, your going to have to monitor your bandwidth of computer(s).

I' de like to take this opportunity to thank Hagel Technologies for an registered copy of TweakMASTER Pro (which includes DU Meter) which is worth$47.95 (on special for $37.95). DU Meter is reasonably priced separately at $20US, with a fully functional 30 day trial available.

Once DU Meter is installed it resides in your System Tray as an icon. All program options and features are accessed by right clicking on the System Tray Icon. The most common feature is the graph which displays your current bandwidth usage both upstream and downstream, to quickly access this feature you can left click the icon.

System Tray Icon On Mouse Over Shows Speeds.

Graph shows current and recent speeds. Graph transparency is customizable.

Forget about speed test web sites, just find a fast download site.

Detailed break down of daily, weekly, monthly traffic & dial up time

Set warning alarms, and notifications based on days, weeks, and months

DU Meter Web site Blurb:

Watching your data transfer rates can be very enlightening as you download a web page, email, or a software application. This will give you a much better idea of how long the operation will take. It will also let you know how efficient your Internet connection is. And it can alert you of dangerous or unexpected network activity.

If you are trying to improve your performance over the Internet and you are going to spend some time optimizing your configuration for maximum download speeds, it's critical that you accurately monitor your download speeds or data transfer rates so you can compare them at various settings.

DU Meter can also come in very handy to monitor whether some dangerous unknown activity is occurring while you are online. How can you tell whether data is either being uploaded to or downloaded from your computer behind the scenes while you are online? You get some idea of data flow when using your browser, email or FTP program, but what happens if some unknown application has installed itself and is sending or receiving data without you knowing about it? Obviously this is NOT something you want to think about, but it happens to people every day. Also, if you are on a LAN or local network, you can immediately see if someone is accessing your computer and transferring information.

The problem of Trojans, worms and other hidden files which can raid your system completely in the background is a serious one, one that is becoming more and more common. Don't let this happen to you! DU Meter can monitor this activity for you 100% of the time and let you know if data is flowing behind your back. You can then log off from your ISP immediately and terminate the activity.

Sadly DU Meter does suffer from a couple of shortfalls. The first isn't DU Meters fault but has to do with how busy your CPU is, and how fast it can compute your statistics. DU Meter reports speeds as being excessively high if your pinning (98%+ usage) your CPU, my 275kb/s average usually jumps to 450kb/s. The second is an unimplemented feature (I've emailed them about this). They give you the option to export your traffic details to an excel file, but it does not allow you to re import them after an OS reinstall for example.

In conclusion DU Meter is one of the essential applications that I always have installed and running under Windows, on all my networked Windows computers.

Homepage: DU Meter
Homepage: TweakMASTER
Download: DU Meter Installer - Windows 98/NT4/2K/XP