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NetPerSec

This utility from PC Magazine reports on TCP/IP performance

January  9, 2001 

I installed NetPerSec on an NT4 workstation machine with SP6a. NetPerSec was version 1.0. 

It put itself in the startup folder without either informing me or asking me. Specifically, it went into the startup folder for me, not the one for all users. 

I moved the shortcut for it from the startup folder to my desktop to prevent it from running at boot time. Then I rebooted. It was back in the startup folder! Turns out there is an option that says "start with windows" in the display tab.  

The readme file says nothing about dealing with the zip file. Perhaps because it comes from PC Magazine, the author assumes everyone is up on zip files. It fails to note that you can (probably) delete all the unzipped files after the product has been installed. I did and it seems to run just fine without them. 

The readme file says the program tracks any and all TCP/IP activity. However, it has only one bucket in which to report activity. If you are on a LAN that uses TCP/IP and concurrently dialed onto the Internet, traffic from both sources would be reported together. 

The readme file from the downloaded zip file is not copied to the directory where the product is installed. 

Just after installing it, I ran it and it found TCP/IP activity. This is strange as the machine was not connected to a LAN and was not dialed on to the Internet. The screen shot below shows this mysterious TCP/IP activity. 

Update:   A reader wrote to say that this   is likely to be loopback TCP   activity.  June 22, 2002

When the program displays bits/second it automatically converts to Kbps when the number is over a thousand. If the speed then falls under a thousand, its back to plain old bits/second. As a dial-up modem user, I found this annoying. For one thing,, "K" is not a thousand, its 1,024, and converting from kilobits/second to bits/second is too much for me to do in my head. Second, there is no need to ever show dial-up users kilobits. Dial-up connections max out at 53,000 bits/second, so a single measurement would be more consistent. In fairness, this was probably done to accommodate broadband users whose connection speeds often exceed a million bits/second. 

If you leave NetPerSec running all the time, the information it displays becomes all but useless. Most of the time, my Internet connection is doing nothing as I am reading web pages. The average speed that NetPerSec reports includes this dead time, making the average, not so average. The program is best started just before a download and ended afterwards. 

FYI

PC Magazine utilities are no longer free. The cheapest available option is $5 to download three utilities. For more on this see PC Mag freebies are no more By Fernando Cassia in The Inquirer. May 19, 2003.

One program that competes with this is NetStatLive from Analogx which I have not used. 

NetPerSec was first published in the PC Magazine issue of January 16, 2001. 

Tech support for NetPerSec is provided by PC Magazine here. You have to join ZDnet to use it.