Now this issue is truly interesting. For starters, who will actually notice that some Windows service is producing permanent internet traffic? Secondly it was really kinda hard to find out what was causing the download.
I don’t know which Windows versions do have this scenario, but I’m guessing Windows XP and all later versions are “affected”. I’ve experienced it with Windows 7 x64 and Windows 7 x64 with SP1.
It hasn’t been the first time that I had noticed something was causing traffic for which I couldn’t come up with an explanation.
While I’m on holiday my main computer will keep running however pretty much idle – I can connect via VNC and check emails and instant messengers. I also get a daily report email from my router which includes the amount of incoming and outgoing bytes.
So this one time I noticed that the incoming data was round about 1GB – needless to say I was away not using the computer. This amount kept showing up for the following days on which I was still out of town.
