IT Queries: Computer problems answered

I have been receiving unsolicited large (240Mb)downloads, and only found out about them by looking at my bigpond usage monitor. I would like to find out where they come from, but BigPond cannot or will not identify the source. I run XP ver 2, two year old computer, have a Bigpond wireless USB (blue) modem, do not have a LAN, and I am the only one who uses the computer. Is there a utility which will identify the source of the downloads?

There are utilities that will do that for you, but the information you get is difficult to understand unless you really understand the Internet (which is why Bigpond support can’t help you).

It’s probably easier to kill off whatever is downloading the excess data. In your case it’s probably Windows or another program automatically trying to update itself and there’s a number of things you can do to turn these programs off.

I’ll cover the specifics of turning off the automatic downloads in Windows Update, Real Player and Apple QuickTime and iTunes in the next posts, in the meantime you may want to check you don’t have any spyware on your computer just to be safe.

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