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Excessive Broadband Consumption?
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imajustvisiting
3 Posts
(Offline)
1
September 2, 2009 - 10:21 am

Hi!

I really wasn't sure where to post this, but as the problem may be security related, I thought that I'd give it a shot.

I downloaded a bandwidth monitor to help keep me within my Hughes.Net imposed limit of 350 megs per day. The first few days went just fine, but for the past three or four, I've been chewing through 85-100 megs just loading my home pages and reading a little news. (homepages are news.yahoo.com, cnn.com, foxnews.com, and weather.com)

I haven't been watching videos or downloading music or anything like it. Just launching my browser and going through maybe 20 articles, tops.

I've run hijack this and a bandwidth tracker, and I can't find anything going on, but the greatest usage seems to come in the first hour or so. After that, consumption drops dramatically. Since I did my testing this morning after my usage shot up, I figure that I may need to try it again in the morning on boot.

Anyway, I am running Norton's, IE8, and Outlook on Windows XP.

This is driving me nuts as I burn through all my bandwidth for the day by 9:00 a.m. Any ideas?

Thanks!

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Chad Johnson
867 Posts
(Offline)
2
September 2, 2009 - 10:52 am

350 MB/ day?

Ouch.

My first guess is going to be that nearly all your software is running out to the Internet to check for updates. If you can get a copy of Wireshark [url:8syos0yl]http://www.wireshark.org[/url:8syos0yl] you can watch all the traffic out of your PC and, along with lots of other stuff, see the destination of all the traffic.

Do you have a SW Firewall? You could also set it to ask for every request (annoying, yes) to the Internet, but you would certainly see what was connecting.

wow, 350 / day. That makes Comcast look generous!

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imajustvisiting
3 Posts
(Offline)
3
September 2, 2009 - 11:34 am

[quote="Ziggie":io4u4mad]350 MB/ day?

Ouch.

wow, 350 / day. That makes Comcast look generous![/quote:io4u4mad]

Yep - 350 big ones. That means very little Flick'r, no U-tube, etc. It's very painful, but right now it's our only option besides zooming right along at 22.8 - our fastest dial-up speed. They were unlimited when we first signed up five years ago, but somewhere along the line they put some incredibly harsh restrictions on all their users. We get unlimited between 3:00 am and 6:00 as long as we only download one file at a time. If we download two, then they count them both anyway. (ARG!!!)

I did download a tracker, and I am going to try it again in the morning. I'm just running on the Mac side of my machine for the rest of today. It has a built-in activity monitor, and if it is malware on the XP side, it won't affect OSX. I guess I need to take a closer look at my Norton's to see if it can be configured like the Zone Alarm could. You're right, it will be a pain in the butt, but once we get FAP'd, it's for 24 hours, and that's even worse.

Thanks!
Mary

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Chad Johnson
867 Posts
(Offline)
4
September 3, 2009 - 9:16 am

Personally...I think I'd take the dial up.

LoL

If Norton won't do it for you, you can download a free copy of Zone Alarm and use that for a bit.

--zig

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