bandwidth meter?

It's not the bandwidth that's the problem.. That's just how fast your transfer speed is.

You are just transferring a ton of data.. ;)

My office uses MiFi's for the staff that goes out of the office to keep in touch with the office and such..

Well, one MiFi used up it's 5GB monthly limit in 3 days! I called the staff person and finally got them to admit they were using it to Skype with..

The only way I know to track your computers data use is to check the Network Connections properties and look at the "Activity" readings.. XP boxes uses "packets" and who the heck knows what that is, but I'm sure there is some sort of conversion you can find on it... Windows 7 uses "bytes", which you can also convert to MB or GB, but that's the only way I know, other than your service provider that obviously tracks it to to the MB..

Good luck!

Mitch

You have just described the symptom of a virus infection.

The virus is called Win 8 tiles updating.

The cure is to turn off all tiles updates.

Any transfer of graphics - playing Farmville on a PC is going to run through a lot of data and you are seeing that first hand. !0Gb is a lot to go through in two days - and expensive. A PC browser is also using more data when browsing a website than a mobile browser uses on the same webpages. Your wife would do better using a tablet or cell phone to play Farmville. Your message boards use a minimal amount of data and have no dent in that 10Gb used. Try to get the wife to slow down on her Farmville habit. There are a lot more constructive things to do on the Internet- and if she is playing this much it is a habit - and an expensive one!

camperpaul wrote:
You have just described the symptom of a virus infection.

The virus is called Win 8 tiles updating.

The cure is to turn off all tiles updates.

Not to discount a possible virus or malware, but to say WIN 8 tile updates is a virus and burning through 10G of data in two days is a pure fantasy.

Try installing the free NetWorx utility. Under Usage Reports, there is a tab that monitors data usage by individual applications.

you will need to install the monitor on "EACH' device, aka the wifes laptop and your PC

Transfer speed has nothing to do with data used, and it's not coming from these primarily text based pages. Facebook, Instagram, etc., shipping pix around will suck up bits quickly. But call the provider and ask when all this data is being used? My daughter got a data alert right after she got a 5S. Habits were exactly the same as the 4S, just a phone change.. AT&T looked at the logs and couldn't explain it so they averaged it to the previous bills.

1492 wrote:

camperpaul wrote:
You have just described the symptom of a virus infection.

The virus is called Win 8 tiles updating.

The cure is to turn off all tiles updates.

Not to discount a possible virus or malware, but to say WIN 8 tile updates is a virus and burning through 10G of data in two days is a pure fantasy.

Try installing the free NetWorx utility. Under Usage Reports, there is a tab that monitors data usage by individual applications.

I'm using the Networx utility. It's nice but still leaves you wondering about what's using the data. For instance, it might tell me that my browser has used xGB of data but doesn't tell me what each website has used so I'm still guessing how I really get close to my limit each month.

One of my chief suspects is all the mini-video on FB and Yahoo, whether it's user videos or embedded ads. I found a tip that I'm testing now and seems to be helping. If you're using Chrome as your browser there's an option in advanced settings, privacy, content settings, plug-ins to select 'click to play' instead of Run Automatically. I just found that a few days ago and I'm still testing but it looks like my usage has dropped significantly.

I noticed when running FB in IE11 that friends videos would just automatically start playing when I scrolled past them so I contacted FB to allow us poor users to disable that feature, not sure that will ever happen so now I only visit FB in Chrome.