After having dealt with HP's customer service, I would tend to agree. They are stellar and they treat their folks right.

I use BitMeter OS. http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeterOs It's a nice piece of software that has a number of useful features, such as a stopwatch that measures the amount of bandwidth you are using over a short period of time. You can also query a database that has information on your bandwidth usage over time. You can export these data as a CSV. The only drawback is that, by default, the software writes to your drive every 1 second when it is in use. You can change this using command line options. I have it write once a minute personally.