Is Win8 using up my hotspot bandwidth limit?

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Hello, all—

I have a wireless 4G hotspot with a 5 Gig per month limit, or I have to pay extra. With my Windows 7 laptop, I rarely went over the 5 Gig cap. Since buying a Windows 8 laptop, and using it essentially the same amount, I have overrun my 5 Gig limit almost every month. When I connect to my home network (not using the hot spot), I have a network drive that automatically backs up any files that have changed. I have noticed that every day, it is backing up between 4,000 to 5,000 files that have changed.

My question is: Does Windows 8 (and now 8.1) do more internet access behind the scenes than Windows 7 did? I did my Windows 8 and 8.1 setup with a local user-id, not a Microsoft network ID.

Thanks!
Pat

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Could be due to the Live Tiles in the Modern Interface. There’s no way to disable all of them in one shot, they have to be individually by right clicking on one and selecting “Turn Live Tile off” at the bottom of the screen.

Jerry

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There’s no way to disable all of them in one shot, they have to be individually by right clicking on one and selecting “Turn Live Tile off” at the bottom of the screen.

… in Windows 8.0, but with Windows 8.1 you can right-click (or left-click after the first one) a whole bunch of them before clicking “Turn Live Tile off” once.

Bruce

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I agree that it could be in the Modern UI end of Windows 8.
The good news is that you can get in there and lock it down; turn off all those live tiles, uninstall many of them actually.
Go into the setting section and modify all those location and privacy settings. Turn automatic updates off while your at it.
Turn off the Windows 8 store.
[Windows 8] How to decrease data or bandwidth usage (by using ‘metered connection’), and how to turn on ‘airplane mode’
Read more at http://dottech.org/88703/windows-8-how-to-minimize-data-or-bandwidth-usage-by-using-metered-connection-and-how-to-turn-on-airplane-mode/#tPbmdCoh1uyx4dgx.99

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That’s a little quicker and I should have mentioned it. Thanks for the clarification. But you still have to click each individual Live tile. With the intermixing of Live and “dead” tiles, its easy to miss one. It would be nicer if there was a general “Turn off all Live Tiles” setting somewhere.

Jerry

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It would be nicer if there was a general “Turn off all Live Tiles” setting somewhere.

You can do that with “Turn off tile notifications” in Group Policy Editor for Windows 8 Pro: How to Disable Live Tiles in Windows 8 for All Apps

(And Group Policy Editor can apparently be downloaded for non-Pro Windows 8 and installed with one or two tweaks: How to Enable “Group Policy Editor” (gpedit.msc))

But for the purposes of this thread, I think only “Set as metered connection” may be necessary or advisable.

Bruce

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But for the purposes of this thread, I think only “Set as metered connection” may be necessary or advisable.

Nice find.

Jerry

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