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Thread ID: 72890	2006-09-29 13:38:00	How not to blow your usage from 4pm to midnight?	andrew93 (249)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
488115	2006-09-29 13:38:00	Hi I'm looking for testers to help me out please...... Intro : There have been a few threads regarding Telecom and their new plans and most of you will be aware they also introducing a 'fair use policy'. If you continually download more than 700MB between the hours of 4pm to midnight, then you will be put into a pool of serial bandwidth abusers and subjected to bandwidth management. Telecom are doing this to prevent an overload on their network during peak usage times. How to get around / avoid it? Well I recently had a question on another forum (see here (www.mrexcel.com)) and it got me thinking.....how can we schedule the running times of a programme without using that 'Windows scheduler'? That link I gave shows you how to do it if you are running Excel all day, but I've also written small utility in VB that does this for you (without the need to have Excel running). It is free to download from here (www.bizequip.co.nz) for PF1 users - feel free to post / e-mail your comments and suggestions - it is still in the beta stage. I'm looking for testers to test this for me. I warrant the software does not contain any malicious code, nor spyware and the source code is freely available for inspection at my premises (contact me for details). But please be sensible if you use this and also be warned you are using this at your own risk. The programme was written to run on later versions of Windows, if it doesn't run you may need to download / install vbrun6.dll. You can accelerate the testing by changing the system clock or playing with the start / stop times and the 'check frequency'. Pick the programme you want to start and stop, set the times you want it to start and stop, change the 'check frequency' to how often you want the software to check the programme is running (e.g. 1 = 1 minute, 60 = 60 minutes - be aware that the utility is not accurate to the second so don't be alarmed if the programme doesn't start or stop straight away), check the 'log' box if you want to track what is happening (it creates a text file called "StartStopLog.txt" on the C:\ drive - yep a misnomer I know but I'll fix that in the next version) and click 'Run Now'. Minimise the programme and it will start and stop you programme as required. Your comments, suggestions and feedback is welcomed and hopefully this will help some PF1 members from blowing their daily bandwidth allowance. Cheers, Andrew	andrew93 (249)
488116	2006-09-30 00:56:00	How about a traffic monitor that warns you when you go over some limit? I'm not familiar enough with Windows to write one but it could be a fairly useful tool. Once you get in the limited pool you'll almost certainly get less traffic than you would normally so it makes a lot of sense to monitor usage yourself to ensure you stay under the limit. The ability to set counters over arbitrary periods would be useful (i.e. start and end on a particular day of the month to count monthly use, start at 4pm and end at 11pm for Xtra's 'unlimited' regime).	TGoddard (7263)
488117	2006-09-30 05:39:00	Andrew, An interetesting little program and it works quite well. Been testing it with a program called Binary News Reaper http://www.bnr2.org/ . Just wish I had this when I was on orcon's 256kbs system so that I could schedule it to start downloading at anout 10.30pm when every one had go to bed so that the bandwidth was not sucked out. Now I'm on the so called 3.5Meg feed there is no problem apart from the 10gig cap. I'm sure that many will find this a useful addon to their broadband..	paulw (1826)
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