So recently I noticed that my internet would be slow/not work at all. I spent almost two days trying to locate the issue, running speed tests on every device, disconnecting one and running it again to see if it would speed up. We have 3 laptops, a desktop, 2 tablets, and 3 phones within our household so as you can imagine this took a long time.
My internet is not great. It's pretty bad but we get by. 2mb/s down is what we pay for (0.2 up is what we usually get). Unless somebody is streaming Netflix or on youtube or something, this never really changes. So when we noticed that web pages wouldnt load and other internet apps would work we tried to figure out the issue. When we started running the speed tests, the internet was running at 0.2 download (if we could even get the speedtest to work). We tried turning off each computer one by one, to see which one was causing it to slow our internet. Once, I turned off my laptop and it went up to 1.8 download. When i turned it back on it didnt change however. (strange). So we tried again and again and after about 10/15 minutes the internet was back down to 0.18 download. We turned off multiple devices, and when we got to our desktop the internet seemed to consitently stay around 1.8-1.9 down.
This lead us to believe that the desktop was causing the issue. The rest of that night the internet performed just fine. The next morning before school i went on music.google.com to continue uploading my music. (our upload is trash and when uploading anything, the internet wont load for anyone. Google wont even load). When i got home from school I checked to see if the upload had finished. I used the web version of Google Music because it was easier than downloading the Manager. It's funny sometimes and says that it's uploading twice the amount of songs but it isnt. Anyway, i got home and for whatever reason the upload had froze. This had happened before due to a strange file that it wouldnt recognize. I removed said file from the file location and upload continued normally. So I assumed that this was the case and removed that album from the file location, but didnt continue the upload because the rest of my family would like to use internet as well.
So I closed it and began working on my homework blah blah whatever i do after i get home. I did some stuff on my phone, then went to my laptop to find a picture. I opened Chrome and googled a picture. I left the picture up (along with Google Chrome) and continued on. I went to check something on my phone and noticed that the internet wasnt working.
So i fiddled around with my computer for a while, noticing that as soon as i turned off the wifi on it my phones wifi would work. I thought maybe there was a background program eating up my bandwidth but noticed nothing in the task manager. I continued testing turning on and off the wifi, and got the same result every time - Laptop wifi on=internet doesnt work.
At this point I was scared that I had a virus, so i began running a virus scan and just left my wifi off. I began getting impatient, so once again opened the task manager and looked at the network usage. I noticed that 75% of the time there was 200-500 kb/s of sent information and wondered what that could be. I closed Chrome and it stopped. I opened it and it continued. So I began removing my unwanted extensions and came across Google Music. 'DING DING!' I checked the 'disable' box and sure enough, my upload stopped. I unchecked it and it resumed
So I am assuming that Google Music was uploading in the background, or attempting to. If anybody uses Google Music and notices this issue, please check Chrome and learn from my experience. It was incredibly relieving to know that there wasnt actually anything wrong, just a background application using VERY minimal data. That's why I didnt notice it at first, because our upload is insignificantly small and didnt show up in the task manager
Anyway, i realize that was a very long story... if you read through it 62.7 points for you
I just dont want anybody else constantly using internet without even knowing it.
Thanks
