Neither Tony or I are very tech savvy so I might not explain all of this correctly but since other people could be affected I wanted to give you all a heads up. We have three laptops - an 8 year old Gateway that uses Vista and just will not die, a 4 year old HP using Windows 7 and a new HP using Windows 8.1. We have a AT&T Unite hotspot with 5 gigs of data a month.
Tony bought the new HP because he wanted to play games that the older HP is not capable of running. He hasn't used the hotspot to get on the internet very much because the games are played offline. Last night he decided to see if the new computer had anything turned on that would use data when he did connect. He connected to hotspot and made sure that all automatic updates were turned off and that nothing was running in the background. With the computer on and connected to the hotspot but nothing opened not even a Google search page there was continuous activity using a megabit a minute which does sound like much but it adds up fast.
We did a search to see if anyone else had reported this and we found that it's connected to a problem with the Internet Protocol address. Quote from Internet Society "An Internet Protocol address (or IP address) is a unique 32-bit number that identifies the location of your computer network. It serves as your computer’s “street address,” enabling other computers to find out exactly where you are and deliver information to you." IPv4 which is used now has run out of addresses so a switch is needed to IPv6 which will not run out of addresses. Both Internet Protocol versions will be in use for many years so it doesn't seem like anything that we as casual internet users have to be concerned about.
However in our search for an answer we found that IPv6 was what was using our data. It's possible to switch IPv6 off. This stopped the data usage immediately and has not affected the internet connectivity at all. Here are the instructions quoted from here - http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1855363/hour-idling-windows-windows.html
"after weeks of searching and paying extra for the internet, I have reached the following solution.
it has worked for me so far. I hope it works for you guys as well:
control panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter settings > right click the connected adapter > properties > remove the "internet protocol version 6" tick
I still don't know why this works for me. what matters is that it works."
Our other computers seem to be old enough that they are not IPv6 compatible or perhaps our data card is not compatible and was sending the new HP into some type of loop. Whatever it is we're glad that we found the problem and could fix it before it used a lot of our limited data.
Tony bought the new HP because he wanted to play games that the older HP is not capable of running. He hasn't used the hotspot to get on the internet very much because the games are played offline. Last night he decided to see if the new computer had anything turned on that would use data when he did connect. He connected to hotspot and made sure that all automatic updates were turned off and that nothing was running in the background. With the computer on and connected to the hotspot but nothing opened not even a Google search page there was continuous activity using a megabit a minute which does sound like much but it adds up fast.
We did a search to see if anyone else had reported this and we found that it's connected to a problem with the Internet Protocol address. Quote from Internet Society "An Internet Protocol address (or IP address) is a unique 32-bit number that identifies the location of your computer network. It serves as your computer’s “street address,” enabling other computers to find out exactly where you are and deliver information to you." IPv4 which is used now has run out of addresses so a switch is needed to IPv6 which will not run out of addresses. Both Internet Protocol versions will be in use for many years so it doesn't seem like anything that we as casual internet users have to be concerned about.
However in our search for an answer we found that IPv6 was what was using our data. It's possible to switch IPv6 off. This stopped the data usage immediately and has not affected the internet connectivity at all. Here are the instructions quoted from here - http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1855363/hour-idling-windows-windows.html
"after weeks of searching and paying extra for the internet, I have reached the following solution.
it has worked for me so far. I hope it works for you guys as well:
control panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter settings > right click the connected adapter > properties > remove the "internet protocol version 6" tick
I still don't know why this works for me. what matters is that it works."
Our other computers seem to be old enough that they are not IPv6 compatible or perhaps our data card is not compatible and was sending the new HP into some type of loop. Whatever it is we're glad that we found the problem and could fix it before it used a lot of our limited data.
