The other day I was complaining to myself (grumbling) about some application on my system using the wireless network nearly constantly. That sort of thing bugs me. It’s not like I was visiting one of those horrific myspace sites laden with heaven knows what. I suspected it might be one of the Silverlight player controls on my blog.
Since I had recently added the post David Tesar did on edge.technet.com, the spotlight was put on the Silverlight player in that post. Sure enough, it’s the culprit. It’s autoloading the data when the page is displayed. See for yourself at http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2009/01/28/internet-explorer-8-rc1-admin-kit-ieak-now-available-for-download.aspx. I reported this to the Edge team so hopefully they will change their defaults for their players. Mine don’t do that.
But how would you triage and troubleshoot the problem? My first inclination was to fire up netmon and start sniffing the wireless traffic. Netmon is a super powerful tool, but it’s probably overkill for spotting the culprit. What I should have done instead was fire up resmon.exe on Windows 7.
The new Resource Monitor in Windows 7 adds a lot of capabilities to the tool you see in the Reliability and Performance Monitor of Windows Vista. I really like those new views and displays so I thought it would be good to bring it to your attention.
