When ever my daughter uses her computer her internet usage goes to a constant high activity. It shows on the router as constant upload and download activity. Just as much as my grandson when he is on Xbox live. She has something that is starting up that accesses the internet. We do not know what. How do I find out what is causing this?
Warren D
Favorite Answer
Checking the task manager would be a good start. It sounds like there may be applications opening and running downloads that she may not even know about. This can happen with advertising pop-ups, messaging services, weather updates or any of a number of other things.
She may even have high usage programs like Skype opening, even if she is not using them. These may not even be visible. It would be a good idea to shut these down as they could be tracking her usage or even could be a conduit for viruses that could attack other computers. It is also possible that some of the XBox life software could be running on her computer, if she uploaded anything for the grandson. And don't rule out spyware.
It would be a very good idea to find out what's happening and shut it down. If she is using a Mac I have no idea how you would track it, but I would think there has to be a way.
If she were to run antivirus or antispyware software like AVG or Spybot these could help track down the problem and could also isolate and shut them down.
Good luck.
Anonymous
assuming you are running on windows
go to task manager you can see all the activities that are currently running
to access task manager go to Start > Run > and type taskmgr.exe
and you can also check what programs run at the start up of your computer
by going to
Start > Run > and type msconfig which is the
Microsoft System Configuration Utility
click on the startup tab and untick the ones you do not need to startup automatically at computer startup
Simply RED
She's probably constantly downloading something using a torrent client -- a movie perhaps?