How to Prevent Your Laptop/Desktop From Zapping So Much Data 2016

Computers and it’s advanced control programs are known to be data hungry devices. They are designed to be always connected, always-up-to-date operating system, they also have large screen size that can display websites with more detailed images and web pages.

This becomes a problem, especially if you’re tethering your computer to a smartphone with a limited data plan or when you can’t afford a high data cap. But you don’t need to worry about that anymore. As am going to show to you, how you can restrain all these from going all-out on your data with a few tricks.

 Check Data Usage Of  Your applications

The majority of data usage on your PC probably comes from the applications you use. Most PC includes a new “Data Usage” tool that allows you to see exactly how much data each application on your computer has been using. This will help you track down data-hungry programs, including third-party ones.

To check your data usage over the last 30 days, open the Settings app from your Start menu and head to Network & Internet > Data Usage. You’ll see a graph showing how much data your PC has used over the last 30 days. To view which applications have been using data, click or tap “Usage Details” here. You’ll see a list of applications that have used data over the last 30 days, and the applications that have used the most data will be at the top of the list. This shows you exactly where your data is going. With this you can now disable or customize the app that can use your data.

 Prevent System Automatic Updates 

Your PC normally downloads and installs updates automatically without your input, when ever there is a new update available. This system updates happens very often, and those updates can be fairly large.

There are several ways to prevent your system from automatically downloading updates, depending on the type of PC you have. To do this on any PC, set your home Wi-Fi network as a metered connection. And your system won’t automatically download updates on that connection, but instead will prompt you. You can then choose when to download updates, or take your computer to another Wi-Fi network and update from that other network.

To set your connection as a metered one, open the Settings app, and go to Network & Internet > Wi-Fi. Scroll down below the list of Wi-Fi networks and select “Advanced Options.” Enable the “Set as Metered Connection” slider here. This will only affect the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to.

 Save Data on Web Browsing

Most times a lot of your data usage comes from your web browser–you can see just how much by looking at the Data Usage screen.

To save data on this web browsing, use a web browser that includes a built-in compressing proxy feature. The web browser will route the data through other servers where it’s compressed before being sent to you. This is normally a feature common on smartphones, not desktop PCs, but if you really need to save data–maybe you have a satellite Internet connection with a very low data cap, for example–you may want to do this.

Google offers an official Data Saver extension for Google Chrome, and it functions the same as the Data Saver feature built into the Chrome browser on Android and iPhone. Install that into Google, and you’re good to go. The Opera browser also has a “Turbo mode“, which works similarly, if you’re more of an Opera fan.

 Enable Click-To-Play Plugins 

Many websites include embedded Flash content, often for videos or advertisements. This Flash content can be fairly large in size. To prevent Flash content from loading and consuming your data, you can enable the click-to-play plugin feature in your browser.

With click-to-play plugins, flash content won’t run automatically. They will only download and use your  data or bandwidth if you actually want to view them.

 Disable Your Browser Images 

Images too take up quite a bit of  your data, and this has only increased as websites include images that are larger and more detailed. However, most websites can be used without images.

Follow these instructions to prevent your browser from loading images automatically:

Chrome: Open the Settings screen, click Show advanced settings at the bottom, and click the Content Settings button under Privacy. Select Do not show any images.

Firefox: Open the Options window, click the Content icon, and uncheck Load images automatically.

Internet Explorer: Open the Internet Options window, click the Advanced tab, scroll down to the Multimedia section, and uncheck Show pictures.

Opera: Open the Preferences window, click the Webpages tab, and select No Images in the Images box.

Using Mobile Websites On PC

Mobile websites often use less bandwidth. You may want to use the mobile versions of websites by changing your browser’s user agent to a smartphone or tablet user agent. You can locate this option under your browser settings.

 Avoid Streaming Audio or Video Footage from Online

Streaming videos from Netflix, online TV or the most popular – YouTube, can use a lot of your data, and the better quality the video clip, the more of your usage it can use. For example, streaming an HD film or TV series from Netflix could use as much as 3GB per hour.

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