Downloading a file using Internet Explorer and playing an online FPS game such as Counter-Strike: Source simultaneously is not really a good idea. Reason is Internet Explorer will take up all the download bandwidth making the CS:S game nearly unplayable with a huge increased of ping causing it to lag. Moreover a lot of servers implements ping limits and if you go over it, you will be automatically kicked out of the game. The best way is to limit the internet download speed for the Internet Explorer process so that it doesn’t hogs the whole bandwidth.
Early last year I’ve written an article on how to restrict or limit internet download and upload transfer speed. I’ve featured both Shunra Nimbus and Traffic Shaper XP because they are free but both of it is pretty outdated by now. Today I stumbled on software called NetBalancer which is in constant development and it has a special internet speed priority feature.
NetBalancer is an internet traffic control and monitoring tool designed for Windows XP/2003/Vista/Win7. You can use NetBalancer to set download or upload transfer rate priority for any applications and monitor their internet traffic.
Most traffic shaping software sets speed limits for applications and processes which can be quite inconvenient. For example, you limit your downloading speed so you can still surf your favorite website. When you are done with surfing, the bandwidth is free, yet your downloading speed is still limited! Dealing with limits implies constant tuning of your traffic shaping program. But with NetBalancer, such problems will never exist because of the priority settings. Applications with a higher network priority will gain more traffic bandwidth than those with a lower one.
After setting all priorities and limits, you can see what is going on with the help of special features supported by NetBalancer. It can show all system processes with their in and out traffic speed; downloaded and uploaded traffic for any process or application since the start of NetBalancer. The free version of NetBalancer is limited to 5 process priorities/limits at a time. If you want to go over that limit, you will need to upgrade it to Pro version at the price of $24.95.
There is a total of 2 process by NetBalancer. When NetBalancer is sitting quietly in notification tray area, the SeriousBit.NetBalancer.Tray.exe process takes up about 6MB. However when you double click on the tray icon to bring up the user interface, the tray icon process goes up to 10MB and another process SeriousBit.NetBalancer.UI.exe which takes up an additional 20MB will run. Closing the UI window will terminate the process and leaving only the tray process running. Good thing is you can clear the tray memory usage by right clicking the tray icon and select “Free unused memory“.