A live internet speed meter, not a speed test
Windows has no internet speed meter that stays on screen and shows what your connection is doing from moment to moment. Task Manager can graph it, but only while you keep that window open in front of your work. Network Indicator Widget fills the gap: you glance at it and know whether something is downloading, uploading or sitting idle.
The main window is a dial with two needles, upload on the left and download on the right. Left on Follow the traffic, the top of the dial adjusts to your line, so a slow line still moves the needles and a fast one does not slam them against the stop. If you would rather have a fixed dial, set Full scale to 1 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps.
It sends no test traffic of its own. Its figures come from the per-adapter byte totals Windows already maintains, so the numbers are what your PC is actually using, not the maximum your provider can deliver.
A net speed indicator that sits on your desktop
Show the indicator on screen is on from the first launch, so a small badge sits above your other windows in the bottom right corner. Every click passes straight through it to the window underneath, and it never takes focus. With Hide it while nothing is moving on, as it is to begin with, the badge appears as soon as data starts flowing and fades away once the line goes quiet; switch that off and it stays put.
- How it looks: Spinning ring, Twin bars, Up and down arrows, or The numbers
- How big it is: Small, Medium or Large
- Where it sits: Bottom right, Bottom left, Bottom center, Top center or Center screen, on the primary display
- Light or dark, or matching Windows
Network activity at a glance from the tray
The notification-area icon is drawn live as a pair of bars, upload above a center rule and download below, and hovering it gives the figures. So you can close the window and keep the reading. Closing hides the app to the tray rather than quitting it, and Pause the meter is in the icon's right-click menu as well as in Settings.
With Start with Windows on, the app goes straight to the tray at sign-in. How often to read the counters can be Twice a second, Every second, Every 2 seconds or Every 5 seconds.
See which adapter is busy, and the last five minutes
Beneath the dial, a ribbon plots the past five minutes: outgoing traffic rises above a center line, incoming falls below it, and each direction's highest point is labeled. It tells a finished burst apart from a transfer that is still running.
The Adapters list shows Wi-Fi, Ethernet, cellular and VPN connections, which are up, and the rates on each. The meter follows the busiest one unless you click another to watch. For the watched adapter you also see its address, which copies with a click, its link speed and the total moved since the app opened.
