Internet traffic

[ruth]

Hello
At univeristy I am connected to a LAN, after getting numerous viruses
and reformatting my harddrive twice I noticed that my internet traffic
(bytes sent and received) was rather high...I'm not sure it if was
unusually high, can't say I had really looked at it before but I
noticed a friend's internet sent and received rate was significantly
lower over a longer period of time...

I was wondering what could have caused this (if it was different to
start off with!), and also what is reasonable number of bytes sent and
received? If mine is normal, then I can put my laptop back on the
network

Thanks for looking!

 

[Paul King]

Ruth,

Hard to say actually without looking at your registry and network traffic.
Its possible as you have been attacked by viruses in the past, that you have
spyware or trojans running in the background. Whilst these might not be
malicious, they use resources on your machines and look for loopholes in the
system.

Does your Univeristy not have an IT department? If so, aren't they meant to
provide you with an Antivirus product?

Paul.