MrSlartybartfast said:
Hi,
Vista is downloading at 0.5kB/s constantly. This does not seem like much
but adds up to over 1GB/month if the computer is always on. Is there any
way
to stop this? I tried enabling the administrator and then systematically
closing all the system processes but it is still downloading. I did the
same
and tried closing services but that didn't help either. Could anyone
confirm
that their version of Vista also downloads at 0.5kB/s constantly.
In answer to the question in your subject line, I'd say "It's a matter of
opinion what some of the components of Vista do".
In answer to the question in the body of your message, how are you connected
to the Internet? If you use a connection through a network card, I would
expect to see a negligible amount of traffic travelling over this link at
all times due to the way that Ethernet and networking work. In this case
nothing is being "downloaded" or even "uploaded"; this is just an artifact
of how networks work.
As far as Vista actively generating the traffic (as opposed to it being an
artifact of how networking behaves, that's also possible even without
putting on the tin-foil hat and assuming that Bill Gates is personally
reading over our shoulders via the "magic" of spyware. Vista is a much more
"connected" OS than XP, which was a much more "connected" OS than Windows
2000, which in turn was a much more "connected" OS than..... etc.
If you have sidebar gadgets running, these may well be talking to the
Internet. Obvious examples would be the weather gadget or the RSS feed. The
clock connects to an Internet NTP server to ensure the time is kept
accurate. AV and Anti-Spyware all do stuff in the background... In other
words, trying to chase the network activity counter down to "zero" is
probably a futile effort.
If you are really concerned about what is happening on your network
connection then you probably want to try using something like wireshark
(
http://www.wireshark.org/) which will allow you to actually view the
traffic going over a particular network connection, so you can zoom in on
anything that worries you. It's a little confusing to people who aren't
experienced with networking and haven't used a 'sniffer' before, to be sure,
but if you *are* worried then this *will* give you an actual answer about
what precisely is happening on *your* computer, instead of more speculation
and worries and stories about what other people think might be happening
"because you know this one time a guy at work said...... and he has to know
all about computers because he once told me he formatted a disk"
