I recently had yet another tiff with my ISP over file sizes I've downloaded and have saved to my hard drive and what they are reporting that I've used in bandwidth. In order bring the overage to a halt while I chatted with the tech (yes, I got throttled speedwise yet again), I set Norton's to block all traffic for 5 hours while the tech and I hashed things out. He said there wasn't any activity, which I asked him again since the modem was still blinking like it was trying to send something. He assured me there was no throughput for the prior hour. This was right at lunchtime, I reluctantly took him at his word, and regretted it three hours later when I checked their website to make sure the bandwidth usage had settled. It had not. In fact I had accrued two more GB of overage in the three hours since I had last checked while supposedly being limited to 100k bandwidth.
How did my ISP, or probably more appropriately, did Windows 7 bypass the Block ALL ? This is the first time I have had this happen. Anytime prior to this that I felt nervous about a blinky modem and I engaged the block all, it had done just that. When I checked their website nothing new had accrued once you accounted for the lag time of them actually posting data. Basically I was opening their usage chart prior to engaging the lock and then when I was back at the computer hours later, checking the charts in a new tab and comparing. Up until this point the difference had been less than 100KB. The 2.1GB that happened is OMGWTF.
I know the tech deceived me on several questions looking back on the situation, but I'd like to think he's above cooking the results.
To renew or not to renew. That is the in 60 days question.