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Hey Everyone - I am going sailing for a year and have an INMARSAT FB150 which translates to about $8/MB for bandwidth "anywhere" on the ocean. I hope to only use about 50-60MB per month or less through the satellite and take advantage of a long range wifi antennae for the rest. I am planning to use a modified FF browser that goes through a compression proxy (for reducing image quality, removing random ads, etc) as well as compressed text-only email. (If anyone has used one of these or could recommend the best that would be awesome too!)

My computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad X301 and Windows 7

So, my main issue, using a bandwidth monitor and the built in Resource Monitor for Win7, I am noticing that svchost.exe is using about 200kb or MORE to just instantiate the connection. I (as well as my pocketbook) would be eternally grateful if I could find ways to cut that substantially down and get an idea of what I actually could get it down to.

I have turned off all 3rd party services, basically all starting processes that aren't msft, and also removed Access Connections (Lenovos super heavy network manager).

THANKS!

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    Perhaps I'm talking out of my a** here but my guts tells me you should really start with throwing out windows. My guess it's more frugal with the bandwidth.
    – Nifle
    Oct 4, 2010 at 21:47
  • Yeah I'm going to start slowly turning off services and testing each one. I also just tried out WireShark and noticed alot of traffic is router related. Is there any bandwidth monitors that just sniff external traffic?
    – Justin
    Oct 4, 2010 at 23:03
  • An idea for turning off all but the essentials - boot in safe mode (without networking), get an idea of the bare minimum to run Windows, then disable everything.
    – Corey
    Oct 5, 2010 at 0:34
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    I would say a lot of that 200kb being transferred when plugging in an ethernet cable is communication between the router and your computer, not external traffic.
    – AkkA
    Oct 5, 2010 at 1:45
  • What Akka said - you need the measure of what is actually going out to the Internet, not just what is leaving the computer. Does your router provide any stats on what you've communicated?
    – DMA57361
    Oct 5, 2010 at 8:41

2 Answers 2

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Off the top of my head, you may want to disable all the various program updates. ie. Windows Update, java, flash, acrobat, browser, and all the add-ons.

But the easiest way is to install a firewall software. Setup the rules to disable network access by default, and you just enable the ones that you want to run.

Might even want to consider running the whole thing inside a VM / sandboxie, and forget about AV updates.

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    +1, a blocking-by-default firewall is a good idea, you don't want anything unexpectedly downloading in the background (and you don't need to bother installing anything, the Win7 firewall lets you do this).
    – DMA57361
    Oct 5, 2010 at 8:39
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Not to start an OS-war, but consider booting from a linux live-cd to see if it can connect to your INMARSAT FB150.

You should be comfortable with firefox and a text-email reader as it's basicly the same in any OS

If it works, you could either completely wipe windows, or install linix dual-boot, so you can select OS at startup.

(OS=Operating system, eg Windows or Linux)

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