Most of my computers have been connected via an uncapped broadband connection so usually I don’t care about how much data I “use”.
Recently I installed a computer in a remote location where a wired connection would be impractical so I bought a 3G-modem to connect this machine to the internet.
The machine doesn’t need internet connectivity for its main purpose (visualising an industrial PLC). I need internet connectivity for incidental remote troubleshooting. I’ve installed teamviewer to make this possible and everything works fine. For testing purposes I’ve used the SIM from my phone and the computer was fully updated when I moved it to the remote location.
Now I need to make some more permanent arrangements; therefore I need to know how much data to allow for.
The only software I want to allow to update automatically is Win7 itself, no java/flash/adobe.
TL;DR
How much data/month does windows 7 typically need?
So far Google hasn’t been my friend:(. If someone could point me to some relevant search keywords I’d be very happy.
Can you install the free program “Networx” on your other computer and run it for a day or two to get an idea of what you are using?
FYI this is a 3 week usage on my computer running win 7. The big days are when I download TV shows. https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-siT53a6_ed8/U38S4ZFBHqI/AAAAAAAASCw/fVt2Mto_8z8/w843-h792-no/networx.jpg
Windows releases security updates on the second tuesday of every month (aka patch tuesday). Calculate those days, and look up what updates were released on each of those days, along with their sizes. If you do this for the past several months, it should give you a pretty decent idea of how much data you need to allow for.
There are other, non-critical updates they released, but you can get those as you need them. On rare occassions they’ll release an emergency update off schedule, but those are usually pretty small.
The size of updates for Windows can vary wildly. Some are a couple hundred KB, and others hundreds of MB. I’m not sure you can come up with a meaningful average value - if there’s a 900 MB service pack (that was the size of Win7 SP1), you can’t space the download out over a few months.
You can configure Windows to request permission before downloading updates, or you can download them manually. Then you can decide which ones you really need and schedule the download when you have enough space under your quota. If your computer is transportable, you could also snag some free wifi somewhere every few months.
So I should allow for ~1GB in updates alone…
I guess that’s what thumb drives are for.
Thanks everyone!
