Best Free Software
Process Network Monitor
Track the internet activity of all your PC’S running processes, using the new ‘Mega 2017 edition’ of this free tool. Process Network Monitor displays a list of running processes that are currently communicating with the internet, and shows how much data they’re sending and receiving. At a glance, you can see which programs are hogging your bandwidth and may even be spying on you. As well as rooting out Trojans and spyware, you can discover which programs and Windows tools are sending data to their servers from your PC.
The list of network-active processes is likely to include your browser, your antivirus (AV) and Windows Search (‘Searchui. exe’). If you don’t recognise a process, or it has no reason to connect to the internet, right-click it then select Scan Online to check for reports of dodgy activity. The program lets you check a process with online malware database Virustotal ( www.virustotal.com) and process directory Process Library ( www.processlibrary.com), as well as Google. It also now lets you export the whole list as a text (XML) or HTML file (see 4 in screenshot below).
Now for the bad news – it’s a pain to install. Version 6.0 comes with a new installer that Chrome, Avast and Windows blocked on the day of its release. Within a couple of days these false positives had been cleared up, but if this happens, you can get around the block by whitelisting the installer file.
To get it, go to the link above, then click the words Download Link (in green at the top). Don’t click any Download buttons – they are adverts (and they seem immune to Adblock Plus). Extract the contents of the ZIP and then run the installer (‘Setup_procnetmonitor.exe’). After all this, setup is quick and junk-free, and the program is less than 5MB in size.