I’m having a problem that I just can’t figure out. I’m on Wildblue satellite net, which means a limited amount of bandwidth a month. We’ve been having trouble with the usage being more than we thought it should be so I downloaded a bandwidth monitor to see how much we were using a day. Well recently, I’ve been seeing large numbers that are in no way from my own browsing. And they seem to be happening mostly while my computer’s in sleep mode. Like today, I went to bed before midnight, so my log should indicate 0MB or close to it this morning. However, it’s saying that I downloaded over 400mb and uploaded 70mb. I’m very confused because I have nothing on auto update. I ran Avast and Malwarebytes and both came up clean. Looking at the Resource Monitor (Win 7 x64), the only odd thing I see are four different svchost.exe processes using bandwidth and Avast seems to be as well, even though I’m doing nothing right now except writing this. Any suggestions as to what might be causing this? Or how I can better pinpoint the culprit?
Avast uses bandwidth to keep itself updated.
Since “svchost” is so generic, it’s a bit harder to tell what those service hosts are doing without more info. You can type “tasklist/svc” at a command prompt to see which service each service host is actually servicing. That might give you an idea as to why each service might be using bandwidth.
If you find a service that you don’t really want running and it is chewing up bandwidth, you can then go into the control panel (administrative tools) and disable the services that are causing you trouble. Just make sure you know exactly what it is you are stopping before you stop it. You don’t want to stop a service that your software actually relies on to operate properly.
For the win 7 task manager, you can right click on a svhost.exe process, and choose “go to services”, and it will switch to the services tab with the services associated with that process highlighted.
Is your router wireless?
And is it password-protected?
I assume you can also keep track of cumulative band width used. Shut the computer down for the night and see if the usage is there in the morning. If it is, someone is eating off your side of the plate.
How do you use Task Manager to tell you what process is using bandwidth? I don’t see that as a column option.
I’d use TCPView to see what processes are trying to connect to external servers.
I assume they meant Resource Monitor, and not Task Manager. Task Manager only tells you the total bandwidth your system is using, Resource Monitor tells you per-process.
Edit: Er. The original post even says “Resource Monitor.” Hah. I skimmed, sorry.