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No burning through the data allowance

An unexpected result!

My internet service went down yesterday, so I ended up facing the prospect of going internet cold turkey for a night, getting close to the desperate level of giving up and reading a book.

At the last minute, it occurred to me to test whether the Linux Mint machine ("Gandalf") would connect seamlessly to a new wifi device (an Android hot spot).  And, because the device is metered, it gave me the chance to have a feel for Gandalf's data consumption.

Findings

Gandalf connected seamlessly to the new wifi device.

Upon checking the wifi useage meter the following day, I saw that in the month to end 29 June 2018, the total data transmitted was 0.31Gb (of an allowance of 2Gb).

Obviously, there's no useful comparable.  The Android normally connects to a wifi connection, so is  seldom on the mobile data network.  This means that the bulk of the 0.31Gb was consumed by Gandalf.

The use of Gandalf was to grive data twice, with ten internet sessions looking for useful references for my other blog.  The data being grived was one LibreOffice Writer file - another test in progress - meaning that, for the most part, most use required no data transfer at all.

In turn, this suggests that Gandalf - Linux Mint 18.3 Xcfe - is relatively quiet on a network.  It seems to chat only when it needs to, or the user requests/sends data.

Quite a different experience from running Windows.  Switch Windows on and you, the user, are pushed to the back of the queue while every service known to mankind wants to work as a mega-top priority, "just checking for updates" and all that.  No wonder a Windows user needs to wait 10 minutes after logging on before starting to do some productive work.  I'd need data to be sure, but with just 0.31Gb, it's a good half of a story to tell.

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