DU Meter is an Internet usage monitor for your computer. It shows real-time graphs and can create reports and alerts based on your downloads and uploads. Have you ever found yourself wondering why some downloads seem to take an eternity to complete, or why your e-mail program seems to be stuck in the middle of e-mail retrieval. Is it really hanging, or maybe it’s just downloading a large e-mail attachment? DU Meter provides the answer to these and other mysteries, and can also alert you of dangerous or unexpected network activity. Watching your data transfer rates can be very enlightening no matter what you do online, and you’ll soon be wondering how you managed without DU Meter before.

DU Meter monitors your computer’s network bandwidth usage. It shows real-time graphs and can create detailed reports based on your downloads and uploads. Have you ever found yourself wondering why some downloads seem to take an eternity to complete, or why your e-mail program seems to be stuck in the middle of e-mail retrieval. Is it really hanging, or maybe it’s just downloading a large e-mail attachment? DU Meter provides the answer to these and other mysteries, and can also alert you of dangerous or unexpected network activity. Watching your data transfer rates can be very enlightening no matter what you do online, and you’ll soon be wondering how you managed without DU Meter before.

If you have teenage children or if you own or manage a small business, you already know how hard it is to enforce certain Internet usage limits. DU Meter can monitor network use and report via email, or directly block network connections if preset monthly limits are exceeded. Many broadband Internet users believe their “unlimited” account is truly unlimited. However, Internet Service Providers often have definite usage limits, even though they may advertise to the contrary. Some will take drastic measures like account termination without any advance warning if these limits are exceeded. DU Meter will help you prevent that. It can even base its reports and alerts directly upon your traffic costs if your provider charges by the megabyte.

The program is unusually smart. You don’t have to monitor all network traffic, for instance, although that’s one option: you can also have DU Meter track just your internet activities, or only your local LAN traffic.

Set that up and a small but informative chart will immediately begin displaying your current upload and download speed. This works for us, but if you disagree then there are plenty of tweaks to apply. You’re able to choose from 3 graph types; you can display separate graphs for uploads and downloads; the graph can be embedded in your taskbar, or even collapsed to a tiny bar with upload and download figures only.

If you don’t want to watch your bandwidth all the time, then you can just have DU Meter warn you when your total monthly traffic exceeds a particular figure. It’s possible to perform some action as a result of these alerts, too, for example stopping all network traffic once a particular limit has been reached.

Or you can browse a lengthy list of detailed reports. These cover the traffic today; your total traffic this week, this month and more (with projected estimates of what’s going to happen in future); hourly, daily, weekly or monthly reports, and more. You can also figure out traffic costs and configure custom reports of your own, and any of these can be exported to PDF, XLS, CSV, HTML and other formats in a few clicks.