Network Monitoring

Windows will tell you whether you are connected. It is much less willing to tell you what is actually moving, on which adapter, right now.

Network Monitoring puts that on your wallpaper. One card per network adapter, with what it is downloading and uploading this second, and the last few minutes drawn behind the figures so you can tell whether that number is normal.

A laptop docked to Ethernet while still on Wi-Fi has two cards each telling half the story. Add them together and you get the single number you were probably after — and the total still names which adapters it is made of, so it can't be misread.

Behind the numbers rather than beside them, because a chart given its own room on a desktop card is a chart too small to read. It scales to the busiest moment in the window instead of to the port, so an idle gigabit connection still shows you something. Thirty seconds up to ten minutes.

The connected ones, every physical one, or everything Windows lists — tunnels, virtual switches and the loopback included. Anything you never want to see can be hidden by name and stays hidden. Adapters are followed as they appear and disappear, so plugging in a cable or bringing up a VPN adds a card on its own.

Bits are counted in thousands, the way every link rate is quoted, and bytes in 1024s, the way every file size is. Getting those two conventions the wrong way round is why so many network readouts disagree with the speed test.

And it is yours: any size from a card small enough to ignore to one readable across the room, five colors or one of your own, on the desktop or above your windows, starting with Windows if you want it to.

No account needed. No sign-in needed. No ads, and nothing held back behind an unlock. The counters come from Windows itself and nothing about your traffic leaves this PC.

Built for Windows 11, and at home on Windows 10.