adobe killed my internet >:[

Just today i found out that for some reason my internet download usage was through the roof!

bewildered, i stared at the big, bold, red text that said Prospected download usage: 19.5 Gb.
now just to point out that my limit here is around 10Gb...

i was astonished, how could this be? Looking through my history i found that on the Sunday the 11th, i apparently used 4.5Gb of download bandwidth on my machine. How bizzar! i can recall only downloading up to and at a maximum of 1Gb. that was on a maths kinda solving kinda something else program, which was 600Mb, and the program used to emulate it, which was 170Mb. that and numerous 1-100kb files as well as the daily browser downloads, nothing that could come close to 4.5Gb!

now my limit has been reached and im slowed to 64Kb/s RAWR, now happy. also everyone hates me now because of it

a friend, who had a similar problem told me that for some reason, the adobe update thingie downloaded the same 4Mb update 1000 times! Using up his entire bandwidth.

Adobe updater has always gotten on my nerves, appearing for no reason, only to apparently be downloading Adobe reader 8.1 or something stupid, that and Adobe bridge, whatever the hell that is. then, it takes some time, and patience to stop it. going through a whole load of "do you want to continue when your computer restarts, when your internet use is low, when this that and the other" Geesh just be gone already.

though this doesnt come ahead of windows automatic updates, and then installation of these updates, causing a required restart right in the middle of my assignment, a movie or game (which im always winning of cause, Muhaha! )

it sure does come a gallient second.

See, this is why it's important to get a third-party firewall. Sure it can be a bit tedious having to specify if this or that program is allowed access to the network, but at the very least, you know exactly what is coming in and going out of your system.

Anyway, you should get Sysinternal's Autoruns so that you can fine tune your machine even further, specifying what programs are allowed to load at Windows startup. Almost nothing gets to run on my machine without my explicit permission. Yeah, I'm a control freak when it comes to my computer.

Feel free to ask me any question about the stuff I just posted.