Windows 10 eats up my bandwidth through discrete processes

Question

Ever since I have upgraded to windows 10, first with the feature that allowed seeding for other people to download the OS and now with a plethora of named procceses on the task manager, it has used up my limited bandwidth, perhaps only a tenth of a megabyte at any time, but enough to cause me an increase in ping when playing online videogames. (Where I live any internet provider offering over 5 megabits/second costs a fortune, hence why I have a 5 megabit internet connection.)

The most prominent of these proceses are: System and compressed memory (<- The core of my issues), Service host network service (<- I realize this one has "network" in its name), and Service host local service.

I wonder what exactly, especially with a seemingly memory and compression related proccess, these tasks are doing with the bandwidth they use. I would also like to know how to disable or prevent them from using up such bandwidth and if they have pehaps anything to do with microsoft spying on win 10 users as conspiracy theories claim.

Answer 1

Windows 10, as you state, continually exchanges information with Microsoft, including your preferences, searches, location and other telemetry. In addition, Windows 10 can download updates to one machine of a local networkand then keep it busy as an update server. To control this, a number of privacy tools have been developed, such as ShutUp10.

A few caveats about these tools:

1. Create a System Restore Point, or better, a disk image, before your first use of the tool, lest the privacy tweaks cause otherwise-irreparable issues.

2. Some of the tools are free, some are ad-ware (OpenCandy), and others are commercial products. Some have little or no explanation of what the settings affect.

3. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update will negate some of these privacy measures. For example, You can't turn Cortana off. Hopefully, these tools will be updated to patch some of the new holes MS creates.