Best Free Software
Livetcpudpwatch
Back in the days of dial-up, your computer would be connected to the internet only for short periods. While today’s always-on broadband connections are convenient, they also mean your computer is constantly sending and receiving data via the internet. If you want to get a better idea of which programs are using your broadband, install Nirsoft’s Livetcpudpwatch.
This tool gives you a view of all network activity, including the connections TCP (used when loading websites and downloading files) and UDP (for streaming music and videos). As soon as you run the tool, it starts monitoring traffic. New entries are added to the bottom of the list – to automatically scroll to the bottom, open the Options menu and select ‘Automatically Scroll Down…’.
You can tell Livetcpudpwatch to show network activity for a single program – particularly useful if you want to monitor whether a program you’ve recently installed is
sending usage data back to its developer.
To do this, you need to enter the EXE file name of the program you want to monitor into the Advanced Options window (see 4 below).
Nirsoft has added a number of new features over the past few months, including running the program in the background as soon as Windows loads (see screenshot below 1 ) and copying the contents of an entry to the clipboard (right-click, then select Copy Clicked Cell).
Livetcpudpwatch also lets you see which server a program is connecting to. To use this feature, you need to first download the ZIP file for Ipnetinfo (another Nirsoft tool, available from www.snipca.com/38953), then copy its EXE file into the same folder as Livetcpudpwatch. You can then right-click an entry and select ‘Check Remote Address…’ to get detailed information, including the server’s name and where it’s based.
1 To get Livetcpudpwatch monitoring for network traffic as soon as Windows loads, open the Options menu, then tick Put Icon On Tray and Start As Hidden. You can then open the tool from the system tray.
2 To see only external traffic (in other words, to and from the internet, not between devices on your home network), open the Options menu and select Exclude Localhost Addresses.
3 The Remote Address column tells you the IP address that each program is transferring data to and from. To find out more, right-click and select ‘Check Remote Address…’.
4 You can monitor traffic to and from a single program. Press Alt+f9 to open the Advanced Options window, select ‘Capture only the specified processes…’ and then enter the program’s file name in the box (such as ‘vlc’ in our screenshot).