Spending money doing nothing...(idea #86)

Recently I used a 3G mobile to gain data access for my laptop (running XP). To my horror, just sitting there doing nothing - no surfing, no emails, no RSS .... absolutely nothing whatsoever - the data meter is whizzing away clocking up lots of bytes on the uplink and downlink. Clearly, something is happening in the background and costing a lot of money doing it.

I guess that I could have poked around with the service applet to see what's going on, but that's not very user friendly, is it?

It seems perfectly obvious to me that XP should detect that I'm using a mobile link (or even just a slow one perhaps) and do something smart about it, like stop any IP traffic that isn't necessary. It could work a bit like a firewall notifier - "app X is attempting to access the net and use lots of your money to do so, would you like to temporarily block it?"

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