Windows 7: Mysterious activity

I noticed a lot of blinking lights on my DSL Modem and on my Linksys Router. The modem lights were for Internet and Activity and it looked like a download was in progress. I opened taskmaster and checked applications and there were none listed. Processes had basically no activity. Under performance it reflected CPU usage as 0 percent. Memory was at 1.91GB and physical memory was at 48%. I checked everything in the system tray and nothing was running.

Anyone have any idea what all the activity was and what can I do in the future to identify the activity. This apparent download lasted over an hour.

Running Windows 7 Home, 64 bit

xgdude

Was there a BITS operation in progress?

Welcome to Seven Forums xgdude.
Modems and router always have blinking lights to verify they are connected. Was this blinking out of the ordinary?

You can see network activity by typing resmon in the Start Search then click the network tab.

If your pc was on then there copuld have been activity such as Windows update checking for updates or other programs checking for updates or you could have seen ping request. You may also want to check your Nic settings and disable power on settings and magic packet but as long as your computer is powered on there will always be some kind of network activity if you have RIP enabled on your router.

This doesn't sound abnormal at all. Blinking lights on the router are always going to be happening, even when presumably nothing is happening on the computer. Network devices constantly stay in contact with each other. This is nothing to be concerned with.

If you are using typical cable modem or DSL ISP arrangements, there's just lots of random external activity on the WAN side of the router, most/all of it worthless network traffic. Perhaps some of it is "malicious", seeking out unprotected machines to do who knows what to them.

If you had a software product that could log and present to you the source IP addresses you would know none of them.

All of it is "foiled" by the firewall in your router, or in the absence of a router by Windows Firewall or other software firewall products.

It's annoying to see all of this, especially if you didn't have a router and your machine itself would need to simply reject all of this nonsense traffic via software (and your machine's CPU resources). Unfortunately it is "perfectly normal" and there's nothing you can do about it.

Not to worry, especially if you've double-checked with Task Manager what your machine is actually doing and it showed nothing active or unusual. That's why you have a router... to protect you from this nonsense.

I don't know what a BITS operation is or how to determine if such is in progress. I appreciate all of the responses to my inquiry. It appears that I have been overly cautious and that the activity in question is harmless.

Attached is a screen shot of my network actiivty during one of these Mysterious Activity events.


xgdude

BITS is the Microsoft 'Background Intelligent Transfer Service' which, for example, services your Windows Update requirements and therefore can happen without express user intervention...

Thanks for the explanation... How do I determine if the activity that I am seeing is the result of a BITS operation?

Have a look at the following M$ page which explains BITS in more detail...

About BITS