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Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. He has more than 35 years of experience in IT management and system administration.

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Heavy data usage ^

If you sometimes wonder why you reached the data limit of your mobile Internet plan, even though you are sure that you didn’t download big files or use bandwidth-intensive applications, you need a tool that tells you which application actually used up all your data allowance. NetBalancer can do just that, and more. This free network traffic monitor also allows you to restrict the heavy data usage of an application.

Monitoring network traffic with NetBalancer

The ability of Windows 8.1 to handle metered Internet connections is very limited. If you set a WiFi connection to “metered” (right-click the connection), Windows will restrain itself a little.

Set as metered connection

For instance, the OneDrive settings enable you to determine what kind of data is synced with the cloud if you are on a metered connection. You can also configure whether Windows will download new drivers (PC Settings > PC and Devices > Devices) over a metered connection.

A few applications exist that notice if you are on a metered connection. Outlook, for instance, will warn you and will only connect to Exchange if you give your confirmation. This has a reason. Outlook is a real bandwidth hog. In my case, my wondering ended after I monitored my network traffic with NetBalancer.

Outlook metered network warning

Outlook is constantly syncing data even if you don’t send emails or modify entries. If you keep Outlook running continuously, you might use up 1 gig of data within a day. Note that I hadn’t added any significant amount of data to my mailboxes in months. Depending on your data plan, you might reach your limit just by running Outlook for a couple of hours a day. It is amazing that, despite Microsoft’s new “mobile first” mantra, one of its most important Internet application is not yet mobile ready.

Monitor network traffic ^

However, Windows wouldn’t be Windows if there wasn’t an application that helps you solve the problem. After you launch NetBalancer, you will get an overview of the applications that use Internet connections. In NetBalancer’s main window, you see their current bandwidth usage and how much data they downloaded or uploaded since you started Windows.

If you want to get an overview of the data usage for a certain time period, you can use NetBalancer’s Traffic Chart. First, you have to select Traffic Chart on the Window menu. Next, on the Viewsubmenu of the Traffic Chartmenu, you can set the time period. Then, you have to click the Traffic Chart icon in the lower left corner of the traffic monitoring tool. The lower pane will then display a data usage chart and table for the selected time period. You will also see how much data all your applications consumed. If you hover your mouse over the time scale, NetBalancer displays how much each app consumed on the specific date.

Traffic Chart’s overview of the monthly data usage per application

Limit bandwidth of a program ^

After you find the culprit, you can easily restrict the amount of data that the application can cut out of your limited data plan. The simplest way is to limit the bandwidth usage of the application. For instance, I observed that Outlook syncs data at rates of 1 KB/s to 100 KB/s. After I configured a rule that restricted Outlook to 5 KB/s, the synced data stayed within reasonable limits and I could still send and receive emails. Below this rate, Outlook sometimes disconnected from Office 365.

To restrict an application in NetBalancer, you have to create a rule for the application. To do so, right-click the application and choose Create Rule. Next, you have to change the Download Priority and Upload Priority to Limited and then specify the corresponding rates. Note that, because of a bug in NetBalancer, if you enlarged the Windows font size, you might not be able to edit the bandwidth settings. I had to change my font size to 100%. Also note that, when I set the priority to Custom, Outlook often had problems connecting to Exchange and complained with the strange message “Allow this website to configure email address server settings.”

Limit bandwidth of a program

Limit data usage of an application

Another way to restrict an application is to limit the amount of data that it can download or upload. The section below “Select the traffic amount condition when this rule becomes active” allows you to set a data usage limit for a specific time period. If you want to ensure that the application doesn’t exceed this limit, you have to set the Download Priority and Upload Priority to Blocked. Of course, you can also just restrict the download and upload speed once the data limit is reached.

Limit data usage of a Windows application

It is also possible to limit the data usage of Windows as whole—that is, for all applications. For this, you have to create a NetBalancer rule without specifying a particular application. To do so, click the Edit menu, and then navigate to Rules. Next, you have to add a new rule that sets the Download Priority and Upload Priority to Blocked once the traffic of this rule reaches your data usage limit within the configured time period.

Conclusion ^

NetBalancer has quite a few additional features that I didn’t cover in this post. Its original purpose was to set download priorities for applications. With the high-speed networks we have today, this functionality is probably no longer a priority (sorry for the pun). However, in a server environment this feature could still be useful. You can also set network filters and get an overview of the IP addresses your applications are connected to. I was quite surprised that Windows Explorer connected to several servers in Singapore. It turned out that these servers were operated by Microsoft. Yes, the cloud now covers the entire planet.

The free version of NetBalancer is limited to a maximum of three process priorities/limits and three rules at a time. If you want to restrict more applications, you have to shell out $50. I think the price is justified. Perhaps you can switch to a cheaper data plan after you find and restrict all your heavy bandwidth consumers. The only feature I really miss is the ability to configure data usage limits depending on whether I am on a metered connection or not. If you want to lift the restrictions, you have to disable the corresponding NetBalancer rule manually.

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A reasonably fast internet connection is essential to stop the many programs that require bandwidth from slowing your internet speed to a crawl. Doing a few things at once like downloading a torrent, downloading through your web browser and gaming online would probably cause the game to have high pings and be almost unplayable.

A way to get around this problem is setting limits for the programs or traffic you consider less important. That leaves more bandwidth and faster speeds for what you consider more important. A lot of software like downloaders, torrent clients, and game portal software such as Steam have a setting where you can set the maximum download limit so as not to flood the connection and let other applications access more bandwidth.

Some routers can prioritize internet traffic if they have a QoS feature built in, but not all routers can do that. Another way is using traffic shaping software so you can limit or prioritize which programs can have the most bandwidth. The amount of free software around that can shape or limit traffic is sadly very small, here we show you three we have found. All tools and methods were tested in Windows 7 and 10.

TMeter is quite a powerful application and one of its features is allowing you to control the speed of any Windows process accessing the network. Besides that, it has a large feature list that includes packet capture, URL filtering, built-in user accounts, host monitoring, packet filtering firewall, built-in NAT/DNS/DHCP, and traffic recording to report or database.

TMeter controls the speed of programs by assigning filters. The €99 Euro full version has unlimited filters while the free version allows you to create up to four. With a filter, you can set the overall speed limit of a process, enable a traffic limit to block or change speed, create a schedule, enable packet logging, and enable host header logging. The procedure of adding a speed limit is not quite as straightforward as you might hope and consists of several steps, here’s how to do it.

1. Download TMeter Free Edition and install it. On the first launch, you will be asked to select a network adapter to monitor. Check the box next to the adapter and select a network type, usually Private. Click OK and Apply.

2. Click Configuration > Process Definitions on the left. Two processes (SvcHost and System) are built in, click Add to attach another process to TMeter. Press the three dots on the right and locate an executable file. The Process Definition name is entered but you can change it if you want. Press OK.

3. Click Configuration > Filterset > Add > Filter > Add Rule. Press the Source drop down and choose Local process near the bottom. In the Process Definition drop down, select the definition name created in step 2. Click OK.

4. Enter a name for the filter at the bottom, then check the box underneath to enable a speed limit. Type a KB/s limit for the process into the box and optionally change the color the process will be displayed as in the traffic graph. Click OK then Apply.

5. Go to Statistic > Traffic Counters and you should see the limit being applied when the selected process is accessing the network. The Recv bps column will give an approximation of the current download speed, Send bps is obviously upload speed.

You can add another three filters to TMeter but must first delete the filters that are included by default. Just highlight ICMP, DNS, and All traffic then delete each filter. The built in process definition SVCHOST could be useful to control Windows Update download speeds. TMeter cannot apply a limit to a single process when several with the same name are running, like with Google Chrome. A workaround is applying a destination IP address in the filter to limit traffic only from that IP.

2. NetBalancer

NetBalancer is a well known and popular bandwidth management application. You can use it a couple of different ways, to either set a download/upload speed limit or set a priority. That means programs with a higher priority are given more of the bandwidth they need while lower priority programs will run at reduced speeds when required.

NetBalancer is shareware costing $49.95 and recent free versions don’t allow any rules or limits, only monitoring. Three free rules and three free limits/priorities were removed starting with version 9.3. You can still download version 9.2.7 from the website which has those free functions, but there’s an expiry date hard-coded into the software. Read below how to get around the issue.

Although there are some advanced functions in NetBalancer, it is incredibly easy to set a limit or priority to a running program. Simply right click on the entry in the window and set the download or upload priority to Low, Medium, High, Limit, Block or Ignore. The first three set a priority relative to other traffic while Block stops the program accessing the internet completely. Limit allows you to manually set the maximum down and up speed in Kilobytes.

There’s a maximum of three rules that can be applied where you can configure specific limits on a schedule. There are some default rules to get you started, including one to block Microsoft telemetry IPs on Windows 10, 8 and 7. A tray traffic monitor which runs on the task bar with visual traffic window is available to run as a separate tool.

How To Get NetBalancer Free To Run

Install and run NetBalancer 9.2.7 and a message box will pop up.

This version of NetBalancer is outdated, do you want to download a new one from our website?

Selecting No does nothing and NetBalancer will not run. We found out the expiry date for NetBalancer 9.2.7 was the 18th of October 2016. The tray or UI components won’t run when the system date is more recent. The NetBalancer service will run but not function correctly.

To get around this, we’ve created a batch script that temporarily sets your system clock to October 2016, starts the service, launches the program, then sets the clock to the current date. It’s not a perfect solution but is currently the only way we know to make use of the free bandwidth limiting functions in NetBalancer.

1. Download NirSoft RunAsDate and extract the Zip to a permanent location. This tool tricks NetBalancer into thinking the date is 2016 on launch and will run every time you open NetBalancer. Make sure to use the correct 32/64 bit version for your system or the process will fail.

2. Download the NetBalancer scripts. There are three scripts in the archive but you only need to use the one that matches the date format of your system clock. Place the script and included shortcuts in the RunAsDate folder.

3. Download NetBalancer 9.2.7 and install. Right click on the batch script and run as administrator. Once NetBalancer opens, optionally accept the predefined priorities, refuse the update, go to Edit > Settings and uncheck start tray icon with Windows and check for new version at startup near the top.

Now use NetBalancer’s free functions as required. It’s best to minimize the program window to the taskbar rather than close it to the tray. If you do that, run the included shortcut to open the window again.

To use the tray network monitor, run the script then the tray shortcut that came with the script. Note that if traffic data in the main window or tray display disappear, restart the service using the batch script. This is part of the date issue for the service and does happen from time to time.

3. cFosSpeed (ASRock XFast LAN)

cFosSpeed is a well known commercial traffic shaping and balancing application. The full version costs $17 but it’s also often licensed to third party motherboard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock. We’re looking at ASRock XFast LAN because it’s quite a recent cFosSpeed version. The only real difference from cFosSpeed itself is each vendor has its own custom UI skins.

cFosSpeed does not limit traffic to a specific speed like NetBalancer or TMeter can. Instead, it prioritizes internet traffic so important programs can have a higher priority. There are hundreds of built-in presets for different types of programs. For example, VOIP and streaming software is set to a higher priority along with many games. Other software like P2P clients, download managers and game portals (Steam, Origin etc) are set lower.

Most functions are controlled from the tray icon, double click the icon to open a network activity monitor. From the right click menu, you can change the activity monitor look, enable/disable traffic shaping, get ping stats and show a usage graph. Use Options > Settings to open the configuration window where the built in priorities can be edited or new ones added. The Preferences window also has an overall download and upload limit for the connection.

To change priorities on the fly, select Current Connections from the tray menu. A browser window will open with a list of connections, use the plus and minus buttons to adjust the priority. For more precise usage click the Advanced link. This window splits the connections, so for instance, you could change the priority of a single download in your browser. Click on it and adjust using the slider.

Using ASRock XFast LAN On Any Computer

By default, XFast LAN will only install on a computer equipped with an ASRock motherboard. However, there are ways to force it to install on any computer, giving you the full but slightly older cFosSpeed software. If you have an ASRock motherboard, the program can be installed without the steps below.

1. Download ASRock XFast LAN from the ASRock website.

2. Launch the XFast LAN installer to bring up the “Installation cannot commence…” message box. DO NOT close this box.

3. Type %temp% into Start, the Run box or Explorer’s address bar to open the Windows Temp folder. Find the folder $cfsfx.0 and copy it to another location. Click OK to close the Cannot install message box.

4. Open the $cfsfx.0 folder and then open Install.ini in Notepad or a compatible text editor. Search for the string mainboard_manufacturer=ASRock.

5. Delete ASRock from the string so it reads mainboard_manufacturer=, then save the text file.

6. Launch the installer by double clicking Setup.exe in the $cfsfx.0 folder and cFosSpeed will install.

For convenience, you can skip steps 4 and 5 and download the modified Install.ini file. Unzip it and copy to the $cfsfx.0 folder overwriting the old ini file.

Final Note: Traffic Shaper XP is another traffic shaping application we’ve mentioned in the past. Sadly, it’s not been updated for nearly a decade and is incompatible with most of today’s operating systems. It does not work in any version of Windows 10 or any 64-bit operating system but will work in Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8.1 32-bit. There’s also limitations placed on this free version such as a maximum of 5 rules, support for TCP only and shaping up to 3,687 KB/s. However, you can still download Traffic Shaper XP if it satisfies your requirements.