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When working with important or classified data it's always a good idea to take some security measures or constantly keep an eye on data transfer. The first place to look is the Internet, since it connects your computer with many more around the world. A simple monitoring utility is Bandwidth Monitor Zed, which shows you how many bits of info go in and out of your PC.

Right after the download process is finished, you can go ahead and run the application to see what it's all about. As such, system registries remain intact, making sure so does your PC's health status, also making it possible to take it with you on a USB Flash drive.

As if the name doesn't speak for itself, the application's main purpose is to show you a detailed representation of what's going through your network adapter, both in and out. This is done through a real time updating graph, which zooms in and out with an animation effect to provide a clearer view and only when necessary.

The graph itself is pretty straightforward, with the Y axis showing speed, while the X is used as a time reference, but doesn't display anything by default. A few settings can be managed from a corresponding panel, fitted only with a handful of options related to graph, sampling, as well as a few general options.

With flexibility somewhat reduced, the application can be made to run at startup, stay on top of other applications, as well as have the main window's transparency level set through a slider. You can pick a time indicator to be displayed on the X axis, have the scale in bytes rather than bits, or choose how fast refreshing is done.

It's best to leave the sample period close to a second, otherwise updating is done either too fast or too slow and impossible to comprehend. To further create frustration, the icon tray is only used to indicate activity, and there's no such option to save log files or record activity.

All things considered, we can safely state that Bandwidth Monitor Zed is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it has to suffice for small or personal tasks. It lets you know how fast data goes in and out of your computer, with updates done according to your specifications, but the shallow set of options and missing feature to save logs makes overall practicality rather questionable.