Monitor LAN Card Usage in Windows 7

When Windows 7 is connected to a local area network or the Internet it becomes essential to monitor the LAN card usage on regular basis to avoid bottlenecks. For home users these monitoring tools are almost useless as it is not expected that there would be a lot of network traffic in the environment. However when talking about production environment monitoring every hardware peripheral of each computer becomes necessary to get optimum performance from the machine. When using a Windows 7 computer in production environment you need to avoid bottlenecks and for this you need to monitor the LAN card usage regularly. You can monitor LAN card usage by following the steps given below:

1. Logon to the computer with administrator account.
2. On the desktop screen right click on the taskbar and from the menu click on Start Task Manager.
3. On Windows Task Manager box go to Networking tab to view the graphical representation of network card usage. (Note: When you see that the network interface card is getting heavy traffic chances are that you will face bottlenecks in the near future. When you see this you need to either manage your network environment to generate less traffic by avoiding the use of unnecessary network services or by adding another network interface card to the machine for load balancing.)
4. 
5. Close Windows Task Manager box.