Your computer may have an internet connection with other servers that are malware or spyware. These programs and services would be communicating secretly with the internet. It may affect your connection and make it slower. Hence, you would need to know about such programs. The following are some easy methods to check out the programs that are accessing your computer’s internet connection.
1. By Resource Monitor
We would like you to tell the easiest way first. It is by opening the built-in Resource Monitor. Go to the Start Menu and type Resource Monitor in the search box. It will locate the respective program then, open it. A separate window will appear. There will be some tabs above, click on the last tab named Network. Here, in the first section of Processes with Network Activity, you can view the list of processes that have a connection with your computer.
2. By Netstat Command
Another easy method to know the connections is, by using the netstat command . It will generate a list of programs as well as the other related information.
If you have Windows 8; Place your cursor over Start button and right-click it. From the popup menu, click on the option Command Prompt (Admin).
If you have Windows 7, follow these steps;
Go to the Start menu and in the search box, type cmd. It will locate the cmd program. Right-click the program, a drop-down menu appears. Click on the Run as Administrator option. A command prompt opens.
- Type “netstat -b 5 > active_connections.txt” and press Enter.
- After approx. a minute, press Ctrl+C to stop the capture. It will capture all the data about network connections and put them in the .txt file.
- Now, open the file (active_aconnections.txt) in any text editor to view the information log. Alternatively, at the command line, type active_connections.txt to open the file in the text editor.
It views a list of all the processes that connected to your computer through the internet and also, which process is having a connection to which website in a particular time span (before pressing Ctrl+C).
3. By Other Applications
Other than these, you can also install other applications. There are many applications designed for this purpose, i.e., to monitor the hidden connections of your computer. For example CurrPorts or GlassWire. It helps you to get useful information about the connections.
Free Windows network monitor applications
