Stay below web download limits

Launch a web browser and visit Softperfect's website. When the site loads, scroll down to the ‘SoftPerfect NetWorx FREE’ link and click it. At the next screen, click the Download installer button link on the right-hand side of the page. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Once the file has downloaded, find and double-click it. Ignore any security warnings and click Run.

When the installation wizard starts, select the ‘All users will have the same configuration’ radio button and click Next. At the next screen, ensure the ‘Install an optional NetWorx Desk Band extension’ box is ticked (we’ll explore this later) and click Next again, followed by Install. Finally, tick the Launch NetWorx box and click Finish. Choose the preferred language from the dropdown list and use the All Connections dropdown to tell Networx which connection it should be watching. If you want the program to watch everything, leave All Connections selected. Finally, click Finish and the program will be installed and configured.

Roll the mouse pointer over to the Notification Area at the bottom right of the Taskbar and double-click the Networx icon there. This opens the main usage-statistics dialogue box. For the purposes of this workshop, we installed the software some weeks ago so we could build up some statistics to display. Here, for example, we have clicked on the Weekly Report tab at the top of the dialogue box: you can see how the data is displayed as a stacked bar chart in the bottom of the window.

There are plenty of other ways to look at the data as well. For instance, we have selected the Daily Report tab, then clicked the little chart icon in the bottom window (it looks like a blue and green square) to change the chart to a standard bar. We have also sorted the results by clicking on the Total heading, so the day with the most traffic is listed first. Click the arrow keys in the bottom window to move back and forth between different days.

Right-click the Networx icon in the Notification Area and you will be able to choose from one of several ways to display internet usage. Try Show Graph followed by Speed Meter. When the latter loads, click the Play/Start button to view live statistics for what’s going in and out of the broadband connection. Alternatively, remember the Desk Band option from Step 2? Right-click on a blank part of the Taskbar, choose Toolbars and select NetWorx Desk Band to see the same information displayed dynamically in the Taskbar.

To set alerts for specific download limits, right-click on the Networx icon and choose Quotas. At the dialogue, click the Setup button and use the dropdown lists to set the type (daily, weekly, monthly), the kind of traffic to be measured (usually downloads) and the allowance (in MB or GB). Click OK, tick ‘Display a message when the quota is used up by’ and choose a percentage figure for when the warning will be displayed. When the quota is hit, Networx will display a warning message.