Bandwidth hogs.
So I don’t have the fancy expensive internet. The past two months I’ve barely been able to use tumblr and a few other things. I thought my ISP was dragging my bandwidth down. They said no, it’s your streaming service which I side eyed. I wasn’t streaming when a lot of this happened.
But then I figured out what was using my bandwidth. Target #1 Apple TV. Even when not streaming, this thing eats up bandwidth. it ate up half my available bandwidth when I wasn’t even using it. So I highly recommend you turn off any updates to screen saver first, and second, make sure that thing goes to sleep.
Target #2 any cloud services like Amazon Drive or Google Drive. Both use a lot. I got rid of one. The other I use a lot and need to think about what to do. I might choose manual sync.
Target #3 is updates and malware protection. The few times my laptop choked was due to an automatic update running simultaneously with something else like a malware check or streaming on my laptop. Always check this. There’s not much you can do other than try and delay the update download.
Target #4 My browser. Damned Firefox. It’s the fasted browser for me but this puppy eats up bandwidth. Shut it off and then go back in and it behaves.
The only other thing you can do is reduce streaming resolution but that sort of just sucks and any older shows will look terrible so I’m not doing that. But if you are desperate to save bandwidth, give it a shot.