Newsletter Archives

• Anybody else seeing big downloads in Win7?

  Posted on March 27, 2016 at 11:15 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I’ve received several interesting messages over the holiday weekend. This one, from BR, intrigues me. Are you seeing somthing similar?

  Hi, Woody,
     I started following your site a few months ago, and started following your Defcon recommendations around the same time.  I enjoy reading your posts and the comments, and have chimed in myself a few times.  Thank you for your valuable service to those of us trying to keep Windows 10 off our computers.

     A couple months ago or so I started noticing something very disturbing.  I have a laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit SP1 with dialup access.  I run the Resource Monitor continuously to monitor network activity; in particular which processes are downloading something.  Around that time the svchost.exe (NetworkService) process started downloading huge amounts of data.  I have no clue what it’s doing, and I don’t like seeing big downloads that I can’t identify. One of the benefits of dialup access is that a mysterious download can’t get very far before I notice it and pull the plug on it.  The past few days, after the first time I dial in that day, the network service process would start downloading, and I’d cut it off and dial back in, twice, before it would settle down and work as it should.  But yesterday, it ran away a third time.

     What is going on?  I’d never seen this happen before this year, which makes it particularly suspicious.  Has a Windows update modified the network service process to be another conduit to bring in Windows 10?  This isn’t the same process that downloads Windows updates; svchost.exe (netsvcs) is the one that does that.  And I have my Windows update set to check for updates only.  GWX Control Panel doesn’t show anything different, either.  Is anyone else seeing this behavior?  It’s frustrating to have a big download eat up bandwidth for seemingly no good reason.  Is there any way to stop it?

  Windows Patches/Security Windows 10 downloads