trafficmonitor

TrafficMonitor is a desktop floating window tool for the Windows platform, primarily used to display real-time network transmission rates, CPU and memory usage. After launching, the program displays a floating window on the screen, and users can perform various operations through the right-click menu. Key features include: displaying real-time network speed, CPU and memory utilization; supporting automatic or manual selection of network connections in multi-NIC environments; viewing network details; embedding information in the taskbar; changing skins and supporting custom skins; historical traffic statistics; hardware information monitoring; and a plugin system. Regarding versions, the project offers a Standard version and a Lite version. The Standard version includes hardware monitoring features such as temperature monitoring, GPU utilization, and disk utilization, and requires administrator privileges to run; the Lite version does not include temperature monitoring and does not require administrator privileges. According to the README, starting from version 1.86, the Lite version also provides GPU and disk utilization monitoring, while temperature monitoring has been migrated to the hardware monitoring plugin. The Standard version will no longer be provided in the future. In terms of usage, users can enable taskbar display from the right-click menu of the floating window or taskbar window, enter display settings to check the items they want to show, and adjust text color, font, background color, network speed units, startup with Windows, and update checks in the option settings. Skin files are placed in the skins folder of the program directory, configured via skin.ini or skin.xml for text color, font, item size, and position. Transparent png backgrounds are supported starting from version 1.85. Plugin dlls must be placed in the plugins directory at the same level as the main program and are automatically loaded after the program starts. The README also notes that hardware monitoring features may consume more CPU and memory. Some users have reported issues such as program crashes or system freezes after enabling temperature monitoring, so risks should be assessed before enabling it. The program depends on the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime environment.