How to know what programs accessing Internet?

While surfing Internet on your Computer, you may have lots of applications or programs accessing Internet running in background. It decreases the actual speed of your Internet connection and also may slow down your Computer. Some of these programs actually require internet access for proper functioning while some have no need to be connected to internet. You can consider below given instances for examples:

• People generally use automatic updates in Windows XP, which are automatically downloaded when they connect to internet.
• More general is the automatic downloads of Virus definition for an Anti Virus program.
• Chat and messenger programs automatically connect to and access Internet.
• Trojans and other internet worms, if present in a Computer machine, can steal the precious data without owner’s knowledge by accessing internet by themselves.

So, which instances / things are harmful for your Computer? You may get problems through Internet when:

• Computer gets infected by an Internet worm,
• Computer has several programs accessing internet unnecessarily.

You can get rid of Trojans and worms by using a good Internet Security program. The second case on hand, may slow-down both the internet and the computer. Those who are using limited internet schemes PM capped with usage policies, may suffer a lot when the limit overs just in the middle of the month and they’re helpless with big bills.

So, what’s the solution? Well, the solution can be obtained if one could keep track of which programs are accessing internet in background and could siege them from using internet, in simple words, restrict or block those programs to access Internet.

Now, how can this be achieved? There are some Network Monitoring programs available for free on web which can help you to do that. Here is the list of some best free Network Monitoring Programs:

• TCPEye



TCPEye shows the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. It also displays information about the process that opened the port, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description etc.), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it. In addition, TCPEye allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process who started the connection as well.

Download TCPEye »

• TCPView
  

  TCPView is a Windows program that will show a detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, and XP, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows.

  Download TCPView »

• Zone Alarm
  

  ZoneAlarm is a personal firewall software application in which program access is controlled by zones divided for all available network connections. The trusted zone generally includes the user’s LAN and can share resources such as files and printers, while the Internet zone includes everything not in the trusted zone. The user can specify permissions (trusted zone client, trusted zone server, Internet zone client, Internet zone server) to give to a program before it attempts to access the Internet (e.g. before running it for the first time) or, alternatively, ZoneAlarm will ask the user to give the program permission on its first access attempt. Windows 7 is also supported in the latest version of ZoneAlarm.

  Download ZoneAlarm »

Update: You can also try Wireshark and Online Armor Firewall which also serve good to deep check such processes, as suggested by Shiv Kumar.

Also see how to find CPU serial number on Windows.