10 Services To Send Text Messages From The Web

Sometimes you need to send a text message, but you forgot your phone, or you have poor cell reception, so what can you do? Or you just prefer the comfort of the full keyboard to the crammed one on your phone? No problem, we've got 10 sites to help you get started with staying in constant contact with your friends, families and even your customers.

Bloove.com - Get your phone contacts on the Bloove site, and then log in and manage them as well as send them text messages directly from the site.

ClearSMS.com - A professional SMSing service for businesses to send out mass messages to their customers to alert them about specials and sales. All messages are assigned a value in credits an you purchase more as needed.

GizmoSMS.com - GizmoSMS lets you send texts to users in over 50 countries an a slew of carriers inside each of those. While it is free to use, it does not allow space for identifying yourself except inside the body of the text.

Group2Call.com - Allows you to import your contacts, break them up into groups and send all the free texts you want to them. Also offers the chance to broadcast voice messages, but you have a limited supply of those.

Jaxtr.com - This one requires the person you wish to text to have the widget (like the one pictured above) installed on their blog or social networking profile, but if it's there, you can text the member if they live in one of any 38 countries.

OhDontForget.com - Not only can you text people, you can schedule them for later delivery.

SMSGupShup.com - A system to allow you to send one text message to a number and they will then resend it out to every member that belongs to your group, up to 5,000 people in size.

Swaggle.mobi - A service for small groups to SMS each other at once; accessible via iPhone as well as by the web.

Yahoo Mobile - Yahoo Mobile lets you send and receive phone text messages; you will not be charged for sending the SMS; but the recipient might be charged the standard messaging rates for receiving or replying.

Yellowpipe - Mainly a web host, but they happen to offer a quick and easy SMS feature when you just have to get out a text quickly. They do allow you to enter a return number.

NetTraffic: display network traffic information on the Windows desktop

If you want to find out how fast you are downloading or uploading in Windows, you will notice that it is not really that easy to find out. While some third party programs display those information to you in their interface, Windows itself seemingly does not make available any of those information to you directly.

Windows offers tools that display your network's activity but you need to know where to look. You can open the Task Manager with Ctrl-Shift-Esc for instance and switch to the Networking tab there, or use the Resource Monitor instead which is also highlighting all the processes that use bandwidth currently.
NetTraffic is a free alternative for Windows that you can use to display the bandwidth utilization of a network adapter.

Note: NetTraffic requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0.

It adds a single icon to the Windows system tray that is highlighting if upload or download bandwidth are used currently. When you hover over the icon, the current upload and download speed is listed in a small notification window.

A click opens the traffic graph that stays there until you click it away again. The always on top graph highlights the upload and download bandwidth in absolute numbers and as a graph. You can disable the always on top nature of the window though if you want with a right-click and the selection of Always on top in the context menu. Here you can also open the program's preferences.

The application uses all network interfaces by default. If you only want to monitor one or some, you can modify that here in the preferences. Here you can also modify the update interval which is set to 1000ms by default and change the colors that are used to paint the chart information on the screen.
The statistics window displays several interesting information. It not only displays the yearly, monthly, daily and hourly bandwidth utilization of the selected network adapters, but also a prognosis and average values.
You need to run the network traffic monitor for a while on the system as the accuracy will increase significantly over time.
The statistics window offers charts as well that you can make use of to display the traffic utilization for a given time frame in the window. Information can be displayed as graphs or in a table, with options to export data into an xml file.

Verdict

If you want to monitor your system's bandwidth over time, then this is one of the tools that you can use for the purpose. If you need information about the bandwidth of individual processes, try NetLimiter Monitor.