Many who have spoken to me in the past know I’m not the biggest fan of Windows 10. It’s incredibly snoopy. And this snooping comes with the cost of high data usage. No big deal if you have unlimited broadband that can handle the load (other than the obvious loss of privacy from all that snooping around).
But what if you’re using satellite or mobile/cellular data with data caps? No good.
Recently a friend of mine who had a monthly data cap of 10GB received a data warning mid-month. 75% of all the data on the plan had been used! For what? He’d hardly used his laptop, what could possibly have eaten all that data? After calling his service provider, they traced the problem back to two enormous Windows 10 updates. TWO UPDATES ate up over 7GB of data! For reference, that’s a little more than the full size of the entire Windows 10 installation download, or 50 times the size of a large set of Windows 7 updates. Ridiculous!
Fortunately, there’s something you can do to help with this. This article from PCWorld.com shows you how to adjust some settings to your wi-fi connection to help delay these giant updates. The idea is that by setting your wi-fi connection to being a “metered” connection, you can postpone these giant updates until you can find access to plentiful internet access—and not use up everything in your data plan.
This might mean you’ll want to take your laptop along next time you’re at the city coffee shop or visiting the in-laws, making use of the improved (and unlimited) internet data for these updates.