Categories
Tech

Your Mac is probably eating your Internet bandwidth (and you don’t know about it!)

Last week, my monthly quota with my ISP got exhausted much before the cycle got over. Yes, I was FUP’ed.

60 GB isn’t a lot when you have a 20 Mbps hose, but I seldom hit that mark at home considering I travel a lot, and home broadband is one of the many internet connections that I use to stay connected / work.

Driven by curiosity, I logged on to my account and noticed that I had used over 6 GB of data the day before. That came in as a surprise because I had barely used the internet that day — no big downloads and minimal music streaming — even though my computer was on for several hours.

I almost freaked out, thinking that someone else is latching on to my home WiFi network. Little did I know, it was Apple, not Pandey ji.

The next day at work, we were chatting about how the new Mac OS X El Capitan is a 6 GB download, and I offered my colleagues a USB drive that had the installable on it.

The conversation went on and our Rocket Singh mentioned about this creature called nsurlsessiond that he found is always on and keeps sucking the bandwidth. I looked up at the Activity Monitor (under the network tab) and boom! This little daemon was eating up a big share of my quota, and it didn’t seem to stop, no matter what! Here’s how it looks,

nsurlsessiond

A quick search and I found various hacks to stop this. The good news is, you don’t need any of those, nor do you have to read through the entire thread. Just check your spotlight preference and turn off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches, that’s it. Don’t forget to click on the “?” at the bottom right corner of the Spotlight Preferences window.

Thank me later. 🙂

Categories
Life

My first Mac!

I got myself a Macbook.

Love how it adds to my iPhone 3GS. Oh, and am I loving the 10-hour battery life and the crisp graphics?

After getting hold of a few apps like office, Adium, Evernote, and Dropbox, I am now looking for a Windows Live Writer alternative for Mac. Any leads?

Categories
Life

My first iPhone!

It’s here! My first iPhone, a 16 GB, 3GS, purchased off Ebay U.S. Thanks to my dear friend Rohini and Shashank bhaiya for helping me with the logistics. 🙂