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In my office network I have observed that turning on my laptop brings the internet speed over the network down by a huge amount. The moment my laptop is turned off (or is brought out of the network) the internet starts working normally.

And when I am in my home network, I find that entire bandwidth of 15GB gets used up in 15-20 days even when I don't do much downloads or any activity worth 15GB.

The above two things make me suspect that something is wrong with my computer. I have also tried to scan my computer with antivirus but it didn't detect any threat. I would like to know how do I narrow down to the cause of the problem. Kindly suggest.

My Laptop is ACER Aspire TimelineX 4820TG - Windows 7 32-bit. Kindly let me know if I should be providing any more details.

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You could start with taking a look at all the running processes to see if something looks odd and also monitor the network usage on the laptop for a while. – ggustafsson Mar 27 '12 at 10:14
It's a botnet!! – surfasb Mar 27 '12 at 12:54
Format the machine, problem solved. – Ramhound Mar 28 '12 at 13:31

2 Answers

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I would suggest that you try several different anti-virus and malware scanners. This sounds very much like you have a trojan on your laptop and whenever the laptop is connected to a network, the trojan starts running. It could either be a spam bot, trying to send out countless junk emails, or it could be a zombie being used in a DOS attack, or it is being used as a file host for others to upload and download files to.

It is possible that your network drivers on your machine are corrupt and the network connection is not running correctly. However, given the symptoms you describe, it seems like a much less likely option.

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Hi BBlake, I have installed a malware scanner in my system. It identified certain programs as malware and removed them. Let me check for couple of weeks to see if this solution works. :) – Goje87 Apr 3 '12 at 7:12
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For measure which program is utilising bandwidth You can use free tool from Microsoft - TCPView

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