• Getting large download usage with Windows 7

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    #472337

    Hello again, Colleagues All,

    I have not visited this site for a while, because I have been trying to get my head around WIndows 7 (Home Premium) on my new computer (Compaq Presario, 64 Gbytes memory, 500Gbytes disk space). One of the issues I have is that Windows 7 (and probably my Norton AV software) communicate with their home sites over the internet a lot. With my old XP system, I normally used about half of my monthly allowance of 2000 Mbytes (I have a wireless connection), but in the first month of service, I was billed for almost 3000 Mbytes. The 1000 Mbytes excess cost me $120, which is a big jump from my usual $30. I have downloaded a few Utube videos and similar stuff but no movies or games. The questions I now put to this most erudite forum are (1) can I download help in bulk once only to avoid my programs constantly searching the internet or (2) if I must put up with it, is there any monitoring software which could track my downloads and maintain a history. I can go to my provider site and get usage to date, but unless I go there several times a day, I have difficulty in associating download usage with particular programs.

    Jim.

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    • #1250026

      Hello again, Colleagues All,

      I have not visited this site for a while, because I have been trying to get my head around WIndows 7 (Home Premium) on my new computer (Compaq Presario, 64 Gbytes memory, 500Gbytes disk space). One of the issues I have is that Windows 7 (and probably my Norton AV software) communicate with their home sites over the internet a lot. With my old XP system, I normally used about half of my monthly allowance of 2000 Mbytes (I have a wireless connection), but in the first month of service, I was billed for almost 3000 Mbytes. The 1000 Mbytes excess cost me $120, which is a big jump from my usual $30. I have downloaded a few Utube videos and similar stuff but no movies or games. The questions I now put to this most erudite forum are (1) can I download help in bulk once only to avoid my programs constantly searching the internet or (2) if I must put up with it, is there any monitoring software which could track my downloads and maintain a history. I can go to my provider site and get usage to date, but unless I go there several times a day, I have difficulty in associating download usage with particular programs.

      Jim.

      Hi Jim and welcome back

      First you should dump Norton. Not only does it phone home but is a major source of BSOD’s in win 7. As someone who does BSOD’s daily I have seen far too many from Symantec.

      Then, if you are running gadgets in win 7 they use a ton of bandwidth.

      If you are still concerned there is a third party app called net limiter that will keep track of and throttle apps.

      Good Luck

      Ken

    • #1250187

      I hate software that insists on having the docs on a web site. The selling point, of course, is that the docs can be easily updated and thus problems fixed right away. But this seems to make it easy on the people selling the software, and not on the people using it (try getting help while off-line!!!)

      What you need is software that will suck down a site and place it on your hard drive. I use HTTPTrack: http://www.httrack.com/

    • #1250429

      Thanks for the useful advice, Ken and Peter,

      I am going to give away the Norton antivirus stuff. I still have a valid license for Computer Associates Antivirus software on my superseded computer and I will transfer that, though I am not wrapt in the new user interface. I like CA because it just soldiers on without any problems and seems to have captured all of the nasties which have been fired at my machines. Also it is cheaper than Norton ($79AuD for a 3-machine license). Actually, I have a soft spot for this product because it was originally written (in the 1980s!) by a chap I knew who was a tutor at a local tech college. He designed it to remove the baddies fierst before telling anyone to make sure that his students could not capture the virus and play around with it !

      The HTTPTrack software is an attractive idea, which appeals to my island mentality, but I think that in these days when all web sites seem to morph into something else on a daily basis, the effect might be that I am transferring the maintenance role from the website people to myself.

      This gadget thing is a bit of a worry. As a onetime developer and database man, I keep up a contact with the industry by subscribing to various sites such as TechRepublic and CNet. Almost all of the development activity consists of gadgets and other stuff for iPads and mobile phones. One of my retirement projects is to develop a practical database for birdwatchers (aka twitchers). When I first conceived it 10 years ago, the presumed platform was a ruggedised laptop or a Palm Pilot, but it would appear that an iPad or similar will be the platform of choice in future. This will almost certainly mean exposing myself to the gadgetry world, but I will keep a close eye on it, in view of your advice, Ken.

      I will also explore the possiblity of net limiter which might widen my comfort zone.

      Thanks again,

      Jim.

    • #1251410

      Hello again, Colleagues All,

      I took your advice, Ken, and got myself a copy of Netlimiter (I invested some money in the Pro version, because it seemed to monitor a lot more stuff than the free version). It looks to be a very useful program. It would have been nice if it had recorded the cumulative stats for individual programs, but it if you are watching the instantaneous readings for a particular program and note the timeframe, you can go to the graphic output and estimate the usage. I have ditched Norton and my CA Antivirus is behaving itself, so I have saved $100 from next month’s account already !

      Actually, Netlimiter is a very useful tool for simply understanding what is going on. I went to my webmail account at my provider’s internet site and found a heap of emails going back to before I got my new computer. I thought “Oh, well, Outlook hasn’t deleted anything. It must be a setting of some sort” so I deleted them all manually. When I got back to Outlook, I found that none of my emails were there. In other words, Outlook was simply acting as a window onto my web site (another source of future expense). I went back to my provider and reinstated all the emails I wanted, manually. Back at home, I deleted some unwanted emails and Outlook took forever to complete the action (you know, the funny wobbly ring thing). Using Netlimiter, I was able to watch the transaction and there was a really substantial amount of uploading and downloading, obviously directed at repeating all of the actions which I had done manually.

      I will be posting an enquiry on the Outlook site to find out what control over settings I might have, hopefully making Outlook work like it used to do on my old XP machine and the fact that I need to do this leads me to add one more gripe to this thread and that is that Windows does not appear to have a book-style Help file like it used to. Instead one has to use that Bing thingy which pulls up what you want, but you have to seek it out from a lot of irrelevant stuff. If anyone can point me to a good source of downloadable advice for reference on my own macvhine, I would be truly grateful. (Would you believe, I still have a nice white cardboard box on my bookshelf, into which fit very neatly, all of the manuals for Office 4.0 (1992 version) ! Gives you some idea of the way my mind works, doesn’t it !)

      Regards to all,

      Jim.

    • #1251516

      How do you have your email account setup in outlook? If it is setup as a POP account, your email should be downloaded one time and that is it. Even if it is deleted from the mail server it should still be be in your outlook .PST file. If you are using IMAP as the protocol for your account, outlook only pulls the mail information from the server and displays it. When you delete mail it is deleted directly off of the server and no copies are saved locally. If the mail is deleted from the server using another method (such as webmail) it will no longer show up in outlook as outlook is only seeing the copy of the mail that is on the server.

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