Are your programs tapping the Internet? Here’s how to find out

I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt that some program I was running on my Vista system was reaching out to the big, bad Internet to do something.  It’s an unsettling feeling when you haven’t instructed any program to go out and touch someone, especially when you have no idea what the program is doing.  Sometimes they’re reaching out to see if there are any updates available but that’s not always the case.  Digital Inspiration comes to our aid with this by pointing out that it’s relatively easy to find out what programs are actively on the Internet at a given moment.

Just type "perfmon" in the Vista search box to run the Reliability and Performance Monitor and then select Network.  The resulting pane will reflect all running programs that are actively talking to the Web.  This will give you a heads up if there are programs there you don’t think should be talking to the WWW.

Reliabilitymonitor

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