Most people today go for an unlimited internet plan, as it allows you to download unlimited amount of data from the internet. But some people, who do not have unlimited internet plan, should watch out for any unnecessary downloads and monitor their bandwidth. The Freemeter Bandwidth Monitor is a free software for Windows that can help you how much data you are downloading from the internet. It shows the bytes being downloaded and uploaded from your computer in a graphical format.
Freemeter is a simple utility that helps you keep track of your network bandwidth, by monitoring, upload and download transfer rates. You can download FreeMeter from its webpage at sourceforge. The download is available as a standalone program. You can just download the ZIP archive, extract the contents to a folder and run FreeMeter.exe from there.
It installs an icon in the notification area of Windows. You can click on this icon to see the main graphical window which shows the download transfer rate in green colored spikes and the upload data transfer rate in the red colored spikes. You can right-click on the system tray icon to open up various options. There are options for automatically running it with Windows, displaying units in bits or bytes, selecting update intervals, displaying averages and more.
FreeMeter also comes with some network utilities like Traceroute, Ping, URL Grabber etc. These tools can be accessed from the notification area right-click menu. The Traceroute is a graphical traceroute program that tracks network hops from your computer to a target domain name. The Ping utility pings a domain name or IP address. The URL Grabber, if enabled, grabs the copied URLs in the clipboard and opens them in your default browser.
You can download FreeMeter from http://miechu.pl/freemeter/.