Windows 10 Pro Question

[rsinger]

I have win10 Pro on my DAW and auto updates are disabled in the group policy editor and one drive is not installed. While I was working on a project yesterday I started to get some clicks and when I checked the performance monitor there was a lot of network traffic. The only service showing network activity was system. Looking at data usage in settings system shows 3.35 GB. Does anyone know what system is doing on the network? Are there any other settings I need to  change? Anything to do short of disabling the LAN?

[Promidi]

What you could try is run Process Monitor from Microsoft Sysinternals to see which process is accessing the network and to what address

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/

Maybe download Malwarebytes Free and do a full scan, just to rule out Malware

https://www.malwarebytes.com/

Note:  Disabling Windows updates has always been a bad idea - but that's a discussion for another thread.

[John Vere]

What I’ve found avoids interruptions is to at least once a month run Windows updates as well as updated everything I have that might need this. Im always surprised at how many apps need updating. Most I’ve disabled auto updates for this very reason. 

[rsinger]

13 hours ago, Promidi said:

What you could try is run Process Monitor from Microsoft Sysinternals to see which process is accessing the network and to what address

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/

Maybe download Malwarebytes Free and do a full scan, just to rule out Malware

https://www.malwarebytes.com/

Note:  Disabling Windows updates has always been a bad idea - but that's a discussion for another thread.

I ran task manager and it showed the process as system. That's ntoskrnl.exe. That's a kernel task involved with drivers. It looks like the system was reporting some driver errors I uncovered. I wasn't aware it did that in the background. I use windows defender on my DAW and ran that. No problems. I didn't disable updates, I disabled automatic updates. When an update is available I'm notified and I download and install when I'm ready.

[rsinger]

12 hours ago, John Vere said:

What I’ve found avoids interruptions is to at least once a month run Windows updates as well as updated everything I have that might need this. Im always surprised at how many apps need updating. Most I’ve disabled auto updates for this very reason. 

I keep my system up to date. I ran task scheduler to disable automatic updates from adobe acrobat and received a lot of errors regarding ASUS tasks. I suspect there was a problem with them when I upgraded from win 7 to 10 years ago and running task scheduler just brought it to light. I think the system was reporting in the background. My DAW is fairly old, but runs fine as long as the network isn't running in the background ...

[rsinger]

Thanks for the responses.

[jackson white]

seems to be an ongoing dogfight to keep things working the way you want. have noted the same without being able to confirm exactly what was driving the activity, finding win 10 pro updates can sometimes reset carefully disabled settings. AVs can be a likely culprit, including win defender. not completely sure disabling updates actually disables downloading files? 

i've taken to setting the internet connection to manual and only connect as needed, but noting an unfortunate trend to require an active connection for some newer vsts... 

[rsinger]

Disabling auto updates stops windows updates from downloading automatically. Some software has an updating service. Those need to be disabled individually. I got a new laptop and have most of the SW that's on my DAW installed on it, plus Thunderbird email and it has very low ethernet activity. If I don't start something that uses ethernet, traffic seems to be the typical I'm here stuff - peak may be 10 or 11 Kbs. My DAW is negligible, either 0 or 1%, but that peaks at 3 Mbs. Since it's an older machine if I have 20 tracks or more I may get an occasional  pop/click. I'm trying Promidi's advice and am selectively disabling non-essential drivers, but haven't found the problem yet. I only use the net for licensing/downloads so if I can't isolate the problem I'm going to just turn the ethernet off.