Has your Internet become lazy?

If your answer is affirmative, there may be a chance that you have some malware, spyware, or adware that is using your internet connection in the background without your knowledge. There is an easy method to check what your PC is connecting to by using the netstat command from a command prompt window. This works with Windows 7, Vista, and XP SP2:

1. Open the Start menu and enter “cmd.exe” in the Search box.
2. When the results display, right-click on cmd.exe and select “Run as administrator” from the popup menu. If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click “Yes” to continue.
3. At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter:

netstat -afb 6 > myactivity.txt

–a option shows all connections and listening ports
–f option displays the full DNS name for each connection
–b option shows you what application is making the connection

NETSTAT will poll every 6 seconds for connections and the results will be saved in “myactivity.txt” file. Wait about two minutes and then press Ctrl + C to stop the recording of data.

To see the results, you can simply open the “myactivity.txt” file in your favorite editor, or you can type activity.txt at the command line to open it in Notepad.

If you find something strange in your result file, you can search for “what is (name of unknown process)” in Google and see what it is.

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