The network icon down in the system tray in Windows 7 did nothing more than showing you the status of the current network, whether disconnected, or online, or connected with limited access. It didn’t even blink indicating that there are activities happening on the network adapter, like it does in XP. I often open up the Task Manager to see the network activities in graphic in networking tab. But even then, I always feel that Windows 7 should do a lot better than that. Network Activity Indicator is one of those little useful tools out there that fills in this gap quite nicely. It’s a portable tool that doesn’t require any installation. Once it’s running, it hides itself into the system tray quietly, animatedly blinking when there are activities on the network. When clicking on it, it pops up a window showing more details what’s happening right now on the network, the up/download bandwidth, the total traffic happened in both Packets and Bytes measurement, as well as showing the current activities in graph. You can also open the Network Connections right from there as well. The tool requires .Net framework 4.0 to be installed first before it can be launched. When it’s running, it occupies about 10M of your memory, a reasonable footprint considering it does run and capture the information at all time.