Exceeding ISPs monthly allowance in one day

For some time download measurements have borne no relation to the downloads that I have been making. These are overestimates that, in the course of a single day, would often exceed the monthly allowance from my ISP by many times and in a short period of time would completely overload my hard disk capacity. If the reported measurements bore any relation at all to what was actually happening there would be a number of indicators, ranging from what my ISP (who provides an online usage measure, which has always remained well within my download limit and is reflected in my monthly payment), to monitoring of my hard disk as well as other lines of investigation. There is no evidence of my computer having been hacked (slow running, regular antivirus checks, etc). I have a second computer running Networx, and its download measurements are entirely credible. The only difference between them in terms of network connection is that one is connected by wifi and the other by ethernet. As far as I am aware this should make no difference at all and nobody else appears to have reported a similar problem. I have accepted all updates and even reinstalled Networx, but the problem persists.

There's something funny going on; can anyone offer any advice?

You just need to choose one specific network interface to monitor in the settings.

As installed NetWorx is monitoring all traffic on all network interfaces, possibly including local traffic or multiple adapters including virtual and dial-up ones and sums it all up.

This often results in incorrect readings.

Andrew - Many thanks. I reinstalled Networx, this time telling it to just listen to what comes over my wifi connection. I also downloaded another download monitor to compare it with. The two appear to be in reasonable agreement with each other, so thank you for your helpful advice. I have two questions to satisfy my curiosity:

• My wifi connection is the only one to my router and hence the rest of my network, so why should telling Networx to listen to all connections make a difference? There is normally only one other computer on the network (sometimes there a couple of other laptops, but not very often), but there is no traffic that I am aware of between the two on the scale that would account for the discrepancies I had been seeing.
• As I say, the two monitors are in reasonable agreement, but why should there be any discrepancy at all?

I would be interested in any explanation you can give me.
Forgive me for taking a few days to respond, but I needed time to put your advice into practice and allow my comparison of two different download monitors to show how they compare.

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My wifi connection is the only one to my router and hence the rest of my network, so why should telling Networx to listen to all connections make a difference?

Because there are virtual and system network interfaces. Click the drop-down list of interfaces to see what else NetWorx could monitor.

Some of these report invalid usage data, which disrupts NetWorx reporting and that's why only the really used adapter should be chosen.

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As I say, the two monitors are in reasonable agreement, but why should there be any discrepancy at all?

There could a few reasons, for example

• One monitors background actvity when no user is logged on and the other doesn't
• One takes into account protocol overhead and the other does not.
• One excludes local (non Internet) traffic and the other does not.