When Written: April 2013
I often have to work away from the office and my lovely 12 core 3 screen beast and when working like this I can sometimes only connect to the internet via either a slow system or one that charges for the amount of data I use, as is the case if I bind my laptop to my windows 8 phone, or one that is data capped as is the case with the eye-wateringly expensive-to-fit satellite system on our motorhome.
In all these cases the last thing I want for my laptop to do is to think that it is a good time to start downloading huge updates or in fact use the internet for anything other than what I have instructed it to do. I have mention this before in these pages so it was with great joy that I discovered that Windows 8 has the ability to designate any network connection on your machine as a ‘metered’ connection and by do so this will minimise the traffic.
However it will still download priority updates and not all software will honour this setting. So a half thought through and half-baked solution form Microsoft again. I have gone back to using Cucusoft Netguard which will monitor my usage and set an alarm off but what I really want is a type of firewall that I can easily set to only allow traffic that I want to go out and come in, but with the ability to change it back simply. Zone Alarm ( http://www.zonealarm.com ) is close to this as it allows you to switch off all internet use, but to have the ability to store profiles would be great, so I could, for example, teach it what it has to allow for basic browsing versus the settings it would need when I have to remote to my servers via the VPN and choose these settings by switching profiles. Currently the teaching mode only stores the settings for all types of use.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton