MARC'S TECHNOLOGY BLOG - PLUGGING THE LEAKS
PLUGGING THE LEAKS!
A friend of mine just got a new computer. Actually, it was a hand-me-down from her brother. We went through and removed a lot of old programs and games and irrelevant files she was never going to use as well as added some security and firewalls. She had a cable connection and a modem that should have been able to handle the blazing fast connection with out any problem. It was clear from the beginning though that she was not able to consistently get a solid fast connection. It was fine sometimes and agonizingly slow at others. Of course, whenever I was there to help her, the connection was fine, but as soon as I left the problem would return.
Last week, I decided I would hang out at her place and surf and download on her laptop the same way I used mine. Sure enough, after an hour or so, the connection got bogged down and not even a sliver of what I was downloading was able to get through. It was clear something was eating up the bandwidth.
To find out what programs were accessing the internet I used this little trick:
Click Start, when the menu appears, click on Run, when the dialog box appears, type "cmd" and press enter. You will see a black box, on the command line type: "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. Your computer will start monitoring all of the connections your computer has to the internet and where those connections are going. After a couple of minutes press CTRL+C. Type "activity.txt" on the command line in the black box, Notepad (or your default text editor) will open and display all the connections your computer made to the internet during the time you were monitoring them. Then, you can check them against your task manger to find where that connection is and terminate it if you choose.
In my friends case we were able to discover some hidden cookies and multiple installations of a pop-up blocker program that was eating up huge chunks of her bandwidth. We were able to uninstall all of them and now she is flying down the superhighway at breakneck speed!!
GIVE IT A TRY. IF YOU NEED HELP INTERPRETING THE .TXT FILE OR NEED HELP WITH WHAT TO DO WITH THAT INFORMATION, LET ME KNOW!!
DEAN'S TEAM TECH EDITOR,
MARC MILBAUER
