Question My laptop eats up way too much bandwidth when I am on a hotspot, phone

[kahoona]

I have a Windows 7 laptop and I have a Samsung Galaxy Verizon phone. Sometimes when traveling I have to use a hotspot from the phone so that I can use the laptop. The problem is that the laptop will eat up my entire bandwidth allowance fast and also the laptop will perform slowly because it needs a lot of bandwidth to feed it. How can I reduce the use of bandwidth by the laptop while still being able to search using Firefox and use Maps. I know that Windows 8 has measuring but I can't find anything like that on Windows 7 any suggestions would be appreciated

 

[bill001g]

I don't know what tools are included by default but you could I suppose block traffic with the firewall. Not so much with the older releases but win 10 will pull updates and it bypasses even the firewall to do it.

I would first set the firewall to only allow DNS and HTTP AND HTTPS. That means only the browser will work. If you want to limit the browser you are going to need a more advanced tool. There are a bunch of free bandwidth limitation tools and web filtering tools. The tool I used to recommend for content filter and limitation was called K9. It is targeted it parental control. It appears you can still get this but I am unsure how well it is supported. The company, bluecoat, that used to provide it was sold to another company. They made high end proxy/content filters. It is free so I guess if it does not work well you can search for something else.

 

[kahoona]

Thanks. I will check into those things. I would love to be able to remove the extraneous content when checking weather or news. It would be nice to be able to get text, simple graphics and smaller sized pictures as if I was a cell phone. I wonder if I could fool it into giving the cell phone version.