In this time of confinement we are experiencing, the operators have asked that reasonable and responsible use be made of our Internet connection so as not to saturate the networks. If we have a Windows computer, it is possible to know what use each application of our Internet network is making, but it does not allow us to know how much data we have sent or downloaded. If we want to know this data to take better control and not waste, we can use a program like NetworkUsageView .
What we can use NetworkUsageView for
Windows knows at all times how the applications make use of our Internet connection. All the information is saved in the SRUDB.dat file that we find in the path C:> Windows> System32> sr. This program, basically, what it does is take all the information that Windows 10 has saved in SRUDB.dat to show us all the stored information.
In this way, the application will be responsible for showing us the network usage data every hour and includes the following information: name and description of the service or application, the name and SID of the user, the network adapter and the total number Byte sent and received by each application.
See how much applications that use the Internet consume
NetworkUsageView is a completely portable program so it does not require any installation process or additional DLL files to be used. To start using it, all you have to do is download a free compressed file from its website. Once downloaded and unzipped, we will have an executable file “NetworkUsageView.exe”. This file requires the Administrator permissions to be executed, so it will ask us before starting.
Once executed, its interface will appear and after a few seconds it will show us in an organized way by columns all the information collected in the SRUDB.dat file. All columns are customizable in ways that we can decide the dimensions of each one to take full advantage of the visible information. Also, it is possible to change your order in the way that is not more comfortable.
The interface of this application is quite simple to interpret, although for some users it can be quite overwhelming. In it we will find a super detailed breakdown in ascending and descending order of all the programs that use our Internet connection. We will also find the path where each of them is stored and which user of the computer uses them. In addition, it will show us the time of data registration and the total amount of data sent and received by each program.
NetworkUsageView will show us all the data that has been stored since the first day we turned on the computer from scratch, so there are still too many data that interest us already. If we want the program to start counting the information right now, we must manually delete the SRUDB.dat file. In this way, Windows will re-create a new file that will start counting all the data from scratch. So we can have a database of the consumption of each application more up-to-date.
Alternatives to NetworkUsageView
If you are looking for an alternative to NetworkUsageView to know the use that our Internet applications make, here we leave you other options:
BitMeter OS
With this software we will be able to obtain a detailed breakdown of Internet use, as well as configure alerts in case we reach a high use of data during a certain period. BitMeter OS can be run in the background when the computer is turned on. In order to view all the information it collects, we can do it through a browser window. The program will create a link to graphically view all the details. We can download it for free from its website.
NetBalancer
It is an application that will be very useful for us to monitor the use made by the applications that we have installed on our Internet network. We can also distribute the use of the bandwidth of our connection by the programs that use it, establishing priorities so that some can consume more bandwidth than others. NetBalancer is priced at $ 49.95 and allows us to download a three-day trial version from its website .
NetLimiter
It is a manager with which we can manage the connections made by each of the programs that we have installed on our computer. In this way, we will know if there are programs that run in the background and consume a lot of bandwidth. With NetLimiter we can limit the download speed of all our active applications. Its price is $ 29.95, and you can download a free trial version from its official website.