Constant B/Band activity

[chrisinthesun20]

Ok, just noticed something a bit strange - I'd had a look at my Cable conenction info page, and it appears that even when my computer is left idle (both with and without my firewall and virus software active) - I seem to be CONSTANTLY receiving data at the rate of about 1k every 8-10 seconds - WTF?

Anybody got any suggestions as to what might be causing this - definitely not something that was happening a few days ago I think. I've run every anti-adware / spyware / trojan / virus checker program you can poke a stick at, and none has come up with anything at all - what gives?


Also getting a issue where when my PC is left idle for a period of time - it just starts thrashing the HDD - sometimes after maybe one hour, sometimes after about 15 mins - it usually thrashes it for about 5 mins then stops - again no background processes running, XP restore point bullshit all disabled, no scheduled tasks - what gives?

WTF the fuck is wrong with my bloody computer - I want a new one for Xmas!

[Grendel]

To keep you deticated cable connection always on, your computer and ISP have to keep sending packets back and forth.

If they did not do this, you would have to connect to the internet every time you wanted to access it.

XP with just itself running has 16-17(can't remember which) processes running. Open Task Manager to see if that is all that is running.

[chrisinthesun20]

Cheers Grendel - I sort of knew that anyway - this just seemed a little more constant than usual - but it seems to have stopped now!?!?!

still having the problem that I cannot seem to renew my IP addy after I've been online for more than about 20 mins, and sometimes site lookup is really slow - any suggestions?

[Grendel]

Why would you want to renew your IP?

The cable providers around here usually asign static IP's to there customers.

Site lookup can be caused by, like, anything. Traffic, DNS server busy, an application installed on your computer that has ANY affect on your browser or connection.

Is it the same site every time or different sites?

[chrisinthesun20]

I don't want to renew my IP - its just that this option, as a little test, seems to indicate some kind of issue - in somuch that it is failing to complete.

It can be random sites that experience the slow connection - both sites I've visited before and new ones - rather random really - sometimes re-booting seems to "fix it" - or it may just be that in the time it has taken me to re-boot the site has cleared.....problem is that there seems to be not way for certain to check which end the issue lies - if indeed it is an issue at all!

usually when site connection slows down, it slows for ALL sites - which to me indicates a DNS issue - I've tried using both of their DNS servers, but this does not seem to fix the issue when it is occuring.....

Does not happen all the time - and seems to have been better over the last few days - but still bloody annoying to have a cable connection that acts like dialup sometimes!