is windows 8 a network hog?

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Bigbacon

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Jul 12, 2007
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I have a pretty slow internet connection, 1.3mb/192k

wife just got a new laptop with 8.1 on it. Soon as she gets this thing powered up and online, our internet goes to a crawl.......

i have other machines with windows 7 and if they are on and running + surfing, it all works, get the 8.1 on there and bam,....slower an a 56k modem.

I've turned off everything I could that would attempt to auto download and update but it just destroys our already pathetic internet.
 
One thing at least, is that the task manager in Windows 8 is very nice compared to Windows 7. What sort of throughput are you seeing over the network connection immediately after power-up?

Also, have you tried maybe just leaving the laptop on overnight? Maybe whatever is still trying to update or whatever will finally get it done and stop bothering you. You should also do Windows Updates manually if you disabled automatic update.
 
Rice is spot on. The laptop is probably trying to download updates or something. Plug it in and turn it on and disable wi-fi. Go into the power settings and shut off the sleep mode if plugged in. Then when everyone goes to bed, turn the wi-fi back on and let it do it's thing.

You can also bring up the task manager and click the processes tab, then click on network to see how much download speed it's using.
 
If it's fairly new and got 8.1 on it, it might be downloading the Spring Update, which is several hundred MB I believe. Just a guess.
 
it kills it all the time. we've left it on over night pretty much every day and if we sleep it/shut it down or whatever, it is fine. this isn't a one time issue, its been since we got the laptop maybe a week or so ago.
 
Time to do a virus scan. Then try disabling the antivirus software to see if that is the cause. Then look at UPNP.
 
Part of simplifying the OS was to remove much status of what the OS is doing. To narrow down the cause, you can go through much more work than necessary to open the network monitor and see if that's behind the network slow down (that information is literally 2 clicks of the Win7 taskbar, in Win8... lol).
 
ReC0de said:
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Don't get jealous.
Click to expand...

Is that supposed to help the OP in some way
 
Bigbacon said:
it kills it all the time. we've left it on over night pretty much every day and if we sleep it/shut it down or whatever, it is fine. this isn't a one time issue, its been since we got the laptop maybe a week or so ago.
Click to expand...

Use a program that allows you to check network speed on a PC per process and see what might be using bandwidth on that new machine. Not sure what the best one is, but the free edition of NetBalancer is one such application.

Also set up QoS on your router if it has the ability. That way you could assure a decent experience for at least some applications on all machines.

P.S. FIOS speed test is useless when they slow down traffic to the sites we actually use. I can rarely even stream HD Netflix stuff on my FIOS connection because the FCC allows Verizon to do what it wants.
 
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dandragonrage said:
Use a program that allows you to check network speed on a PC per process and see what might be using bandwidth on that new machine. Not sure what the best one is, but the free edition of NetBalancer is one such application.
Click to expand...

No need to download a third party app just to get basic stats on network utilization... Hit Start, then type perfmon.exe /res to open Performance Monitor in Resource Monitor mode.. From there you can hit the Network tab to see Send and Receive bytes by application. this will show you what, if anything is using the connection.

My question for the OP... When the performance drops, is this on the wireless network? (I'm assuming wireless, since it wasn't mentioned and that's what everybody seems to do by default with new laptops.) Do you have any wired clients, and does the slowdown also affect clients that are hardwired too? I'm just curious if the issue is bandwidth related (lack of bandwidth due to heavy usage), or if there's something else weird going on with wireless NIC or drivers killing the wireless network. (I've seen it happen).

Is it possible to try the new laptop hard-wired into the network? Does the performance problem return when the laptop is connected via an Ethernet cable? (be sure to turn off the wireless adapter on the laptop when you test)

When the Win8 laptop is connected via wireless, what's the throughput between two clients on the local network?
 
If all other computers in the house a wired, and this one is wireless, I'm going out on a limb, it's a bad router.
 
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