Remote access spyware?

[consumertalks]

I've got a firewall, so I might just be paranoid. But I got to thinking, what exactly does it do to prevent remote connections?

Reason is, I keep noticing that my HD light goes as if it's working, but my screen saver's on. It happens randomly, but lasts about a minute. I ran Ad Aware, and removed everything. Is there a program for broadband that measures byte transfers like the "My Connection" icon in the taskbar does for dial up? That's the simplest solution I can come up with to see if there's something hidden on my system. (Which is only a month old, by the way.)

[rpertusio]

Using WinXP?

Sounds like it is simply doing maintenance during an idle period. That is normal! WindowsXP is smart enough to do some simple defragmentation and optimization of your file system after you let your computer sit for a while. It will optimize for a minute or two.

If you want to manually kick off this maintenance, go to start menu -> run... and type the entire line exactly as you see it here:
Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

If you did it correctly, it won't give any errors, and you'll hear your drive start to chug away for a little bit.

As for the network monitor.. you could try NetMeter. Free and simple to use.

- rp

[AzKidd69]

analogx netstat live is also another good free network monitor available from http://www.analogx.com