See which files have been downloaded

Download Everything. To search for recently created or modified files on your computer, pay more attention to the file time area in the search options. Download SearchMyFiles. Recently installed Windows 10, upgrading from Windows 7. But you people are simply great!!! Excellent, and it works fine behind our firewall! I have noticed a bunch of updated system files in System32 and probably have to check them one by one…. Bob Gunsolley 7 months ago.

Security, Compliance and Identity. Microsoft Edge Insider. Azure Databases. Project Bonsai. Education Sector. Microsoft Localization. Microsoft PnP. Healthcare and Life Sciences. Internet of Things IoT. Enabling Remote Work. Small and Medium Business. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! I have a Windows 7 computer and use DUMeter to monitor traffic coming in and out of my computer.

I also have Norton which never really tells me when its downloading definitions or other program updates. Sometimes a big download is from someone who has sent me a large video file without asking or by mistake.

I get concerned when I see such activity and I want to protect my computer. Become a Patron of Ask Leo! Remember, websites are those things that you visit in your browser. So askleo. Those are places that you go to using a browser such as IE, Firefox or Chrome. What that means is that any program on your computer, including the browsers that I just talked about, could in fact be downloading an update.

It may also happen to be a web server, and have some websites on it, but these kind of downloads are often coming from locations that actually have nothing to do with websites, depending on the program and the specifics.

Some programs- like your anti-malware tools- also update periodically. They just go ahead and do it. And of course, your email program could be checking for and downloading email. But we also need to talk briefly about malware. The problem here, of course, is that malware can do anything.

So if you have an infection of some sort, your computer could be downloading or uploading all sorts of things. It could even be sending email; a classic example of one of the ways that botnets are used. This article talks about using a Windows 7 utility called Perfmon to see which programs are accessing the network.

It actually does a pretty nice job of showing you which programs are connected to something out on the internet; which ones are downloading lots of data, and which ones are not.