Net. Connection's Sent/Received packets

[Kaisha]

Been monitoring my PC lately because I have an odd suspicion that something on it is running without my consent because under my network connection, the amount I've uploaded to the net always exceeded what I downloaded by a small margin, which I never recalled being the normal when your uploaded data is typically tiny in comparison to the download rate.

Anyways, I figured I'd see if the problem was the same on my notebook, and 'lo and behold, it's also uploading more than what's being downloaded.

Is this normal? I always recalled my uploaded packets to be under 50mb for my typical daily usage (FFXI + TF2, no Torrenting or anything of the sort), yet here I'm standing with 250mb upload and 247mb downloaded, and that was with only some typical websurfing usage.

Only thing that's changed recently was that I added an additional router to my bedroom which both machines are hooked up to, but the problem still persisted when I set it back to the one.

I just found it suspicious that my PC (and notebook) are always sending just as much data out than receiving, including situations where you're streaming/downloading a file.
(like YouTube videos)


I did a virus scan, spyware scan, rootkit scan, monitored my processes/TCP activity, nothing turning up. Just, gah, it's bugging me.

[Cephius]

Those upload and download figures do include what you've sent out in your local network along with the internet. If you're streaming stuff to another PC or sharing files, it could account for the additional upload bandwidth.

[Kaisha]

If it did involve the LAN, my upload wouldn't be going up at the exact same rate as my download when I'm viewing stuff on the net. At any rate, my LAN is pretty non-existant as I can't be arsed to set all their firewalls up to allow them to talk to one another.
(nor do I use LAN for gaming. if I need to transfer a file over I just bust out the jumpdrive)

On another note, when I checked the third (only system running Vista) machine downstairs, it's reported only using 13mb of upload with 300mb downloaded over a period of 16 hours (wish my sister would stay off her damn sites where everyone has a 10mb animated gif sig), so I'm starting to feel a little uneasy now with how my two machines are raping my upload bandwidth....

[Shuemue]

fdisk

[Kaisha]

I will be soon once I get the cash for a 1tb external drive.
(main PC running too fucking slow these days for me to bother keeping the current installation alive)

[Norellicus]

If you really want to know what's doing it, you could always get Ethereal or some other packet sniffer and just comb the traffic as it runs across, see what's going out. Easier to just fdisk probably though lol.

[Day]

TCPview from sysinternals should work as well:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb897437.aspx

[Kaisha]

Already used TCPView, and everything looked clean with it. What I need more is something that shows me how much up/download usage each process is running so I can see wtf is screwing the thing up.

About to give Wireshark (apparently that's what Ethereal is called these days) a whirl and see if I can come up with anything.....

[EDIT] Almost like reading a ghetto chat-room watching the thing poke away at the crap being sent out/in. This'll be awhile....

[EDIT2] Alrighty.....been looking at all the packets the thing is spewing forth, and it just looks like my PC is just talking constantly to the main router (through mine) 24/7, causing the upload to artifically bump itself up everytime I did something, as I just did a comparison with my ISP's bandwidth-usage tool, and it didn't report me using a good 1gb of upload in the last 10 hours. Probably something due to the fact that I'm behind a gateway essentially so there's extra communication required between the routers.....I don't know. Tired of figuring this out in the meantime, been at it the last 6 hours.

[Shuemue]

Is it affecting your general PC performance?

[Kaisha]

No idea. All I know is that when I start up my PC, 90% of the time it's extremely slow booting and processing everything at WinXP's logon (I usually just leave it for 6min once the desktop shows just for it to finish doing whatever the fuck it's doing), and then hope the PC runs fine from there.

Otherwise I've had situations where minute things like opening a folder takes awhile to both open, load the files, then show their assigned extension icons. Aside from explorer.exe liking to hike on my CPU during those sessions, I can't think of anything else that could be the cause of that, as my laptop runs circles around my PC on boot-up.
(although my laptop does have a dual-core processor which may help it a fair bit)

I was kinda hoping solving one issue would fix the other, but considering I've not found a legit issue at all regarding my network, I got nothing to go on.

[Shuemue]

fdisk time for sure imo

[Kaisha]

Can you recommend a decent backup program by any chance? I wouldn't mind making a 1:1 copy of my HD to my soon-to-be-purchased external drive so I can just copy whatever the hell over I want after I format/reinstall the thing.
(was thinking of partitioning the external I'm going to buy into 3 sectors, one for a monthly backup, one for a 'fresh installation w/ essential programs' ghost, and the rest for my media)

[Shuemue]

I use Explorer, lol

I just toss in the extra HD and drag shit over.

[Kaisha]

I'd do that if it didn't mean WinXP tossing me a lot of "Can't read/access file bla bla bla" for a multitude of things.

Also, I'm thinking of deleting the WinXP partition on my MacBook as well as the network notes it sending more packets than receiving, where-as on Leopard, it's perfectly normal. And for shits and giggles, I left my PC on a couple hours the other day, and didn't touch it at all besides hitting the power button. What did I see? 60mb of data sent, 55 received. The hell........I know PCs on a network like to talk to one another, but I doubt my LAN is really doing that much activity considering none of my systems are able to see one another, there has to be something going on in the background that affected both my setups.

And off I am to change all my passwords just incase.....

[Raiine]

I use Allway Sync for all my backup stuff, and it's free.

http://allwaysync.com/

It's really more of a folder synchronizer, but you can setup jobs for one way sync for backups. One thing I do with it, in addition to the big backups, is keeping my User folder synchronized for ffxi, since I play on both laptop and desktops, say if I change a macro on one machine it gets changed on the other machine as well next time it runs (uses windows task scheduler).