Win8.1 still phoning home? (Not an NTLite problem)

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pmikep

Active Member
I just upgraded my Router to an EdgeRouter X. Among its many features, it can do Traffic Analysis.

Imagine my surprise when I booted Win8.1 and saw some packets going to Windows Update.

I have WU disabled in Win8.1. And I have Comodo running.

Apparently, despite my best efforts, Win8.1 is still phoning home. (Interestingly, I have not seen WU packets on my Win10 box. (Am running sledgehammer on it.))
 
check the scheduled tasks, could be an update reset something, abbodis file has some tasks
 
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When you don't disable search for updated drivers, WU always tells me I need to install missing driver for my Dell monitor or tries to identify every random flash drive plugged in. Maybe not in pmikep's case, but possible for other folks.
 
Joy. Although it was not a good experiment on my part, because before running his script, I 1) installed a new, professional router ahead of my Win8.1 box, and 2) I updated Comodo to the latest version.

I should have taken the "closing in 5 sec" line out of the script, because as it ran, there were some commands that didn't take. (Either because I'm using a Win10 script in Win8.1 and/or because I've removed a bunch of stuff from Win8.1 using NTLite.)

If anyone is interested, I bought a Ubitiqui EdgeRouter -X. Then I bought a second one. An "Industrial Strength Router" for less money than a consumer router. It was in way over my head and I had to read online for a couple days to set it up right. (Apparently it can sniff packets up to OSI Level 7.) I'm only using 5% of its capabilities. But I would have spent more for a consumer router that did less.
 
Ubiquiti is very good gear, definitely overkill for home use but I like them because they're solid and get regular software updates.

If you don't want to mess with router/gateway level snooping, install the free Fiddler4 app. It runs as a temporary proxy and reports outgoing traffic by type. You leave it running in the background for a while and doesn't impact performance that much.
 
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Router stats will summarize traffic across all your devices, which is good like a security check at the airport. But to drill down and see what's generating locally, Fiddler is easy to read and doesn't install any permanent changes to Windows. It's a pro quality tool (and free).
 
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