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Can any of you folks recommend any kind of monitoring software?




Bandwidth Meter Pro is a nice program for Windows machines; it does exactly what you are asking for, and has some nice stats capabilities built in. The only thing it doesn't do (that I could see) is exclude non-Internet traffic from the stats (eg transfers between machines on your local LAN) -- but that's probably nitpicking, and who knows, they may add it yet. Otherwise, it is pretty ideal for most single-machine internet setups.

Screenshots available here...

Alternately, if you have certain internet router boxes, you can upgrade the factory firmware to community-written firmware with more features. DD-WRT and Tomato are two popular projects. More info here.

Getting the router to monitor the bandwidth usage lets you track the total usage of several computers, be they Mac, Windows, Linux, PS3, Wii, etc...