PC is downloading something in the background?

Is there any way to see what's actually eating my bandwidth? I'm seeing speeds crawl down to 2kb/s—it's constant, happens the second I get online.

Running Windows XP...
It wasn't doing this before—just started acting up over the last few days...

Thanks for the help...

Is your uTorrent running right now?

Nope. It’s actually already uninstalled.

Maybe try running a cleanup with Malwarebytes AdwCleaner, Malwarebytes, and CCleaner first.

Ran through those three tools... still downloading.

For me, it’s totally standard—as soon as the system boots up, it starts pulling down updates from the antivirus...

I feel the same way about Avast—it’s a bit much. But just because it acts up doesn't mean it always needs to be downloading something; what I mean is, whenever it starts an update, the whole download just grinds to a halt. Carl Lee10 What kind of antivirus are you running right now?

Even in Safe Mode, the same thing happens—just constant downloading. I’m reinstalling Windows XP, and even without an antivirus installed, it just starts doing it again...



I took a screenshot right after plugging in the Ethernet. It shows the netmeter I used to spot the traffic in the first place. Even a few hours after a clean install, the download is still running. Speed fluctuates from basically zero to maybe 2 Mbps, rarely hitting anything higher than that.

The OS picks up this network card without me even touching the drivers. I played around with different cards for a bit before switching back to the old one, and at first, it wouldn't recognize it—just showed that yellow exclamation mark saying the connection was limited or couldn't work. Meanwhile, my netmeter was showing active downloads happening anyway.

So, yeah... even while the connection was supposedly blocked, it was still downloading. Makes no sense...

...look, we're talking about kb/s here, not Mb... there isn't actually any downloading happening, it's just a constant "handshake" between your router and your PC

Man, why didn't you tell me sooner? Heh. Yeah, I guess I am a bit slow... 🙈

I actually thought about doing something like that—it just baffles me that I didn't catch it earlier. Honestly, my brother was messing around with the router right around the time I noticed something was off—(which I only figured out later once I spotted some random device plugged in)

Anyway, I'm sure this will be useful for someone else down the road...

Thanks, everyone.

While this thread was still active, someone slid into my DMs. They suggested a tool that lets you see exactly what's going on under the hood of your PC.

Process Explorer from Sysinternals, maybe even an older build if you prefer...

It tracks everything—disk usage, internet traffic, network activity... if you hover over the network tab, you can actually see who's hogging the bandwidth right now.

Solid, detailed little tool. Worth checking out...

Carl Lee10 said:While this thread was still active, someone slid into my DMs. They suggested a tool that lets you see exactly what's going on under the hood of your PC.

Process Explorer from Sysinternals, maybe even an older build if you prefer...

It tracks everything—disk usage, internet traffic, network activity... if you hover over the network tab, you can actually see who's hogging the bandwidth right now.

Solid, detailed little tool. Worth checking out...

There's a mountain of tools out there. Personally, I stick with Process Hacker. It has everything you need and it's portable.