Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / September 2005

NOTE: Follow-ups to set comp.sys.mac.comm -- this isn't really relevant
for the .portables group.

Certainly it's possible; it depends on what you do in a day.  Even web
pages can be chock-full of pictures, graphics, flash animation, etc.,
that takes a good bit of space.  Just as an example, the CNN home page,
with all its graphics, advertisements, and such, is over 400K.  My
local weather.com page, over 600k.  Just those TWO pages together is
already a a megabyte!

Throw in file downloads, system updates, and so forth, and it's easy to
add up to that figure, and much more.

Well, I should ask: Do you have a wireless access point?  (Like an
Apple Airport, or a third-party device?)   If so, have you set it up to
use WPA encryption?  If you haven't, you're sharing your internet
connection with anyone in radio range.  And if that's the case, then
they'll be adding to your download amount.  An unsecured wireless
router is a bad, bad idea, for many reasons.

Uh, not only is it possible, but that's really not very much.  It's
around 125MB a day, or under 20 minutes of usage for a 1Mbps line.  If
you think that's a lot, I have to wonder why you'd get broadband in the
first place.

Did you download the Doom 3 demo?  That's 465MB right there; over 1/10th
of your usage for one file.  Maybe you didn't, but it's really easy for
a lot of little transfers to add up.