Optimizing My Computer To Live With Data Caps

Since I’m currently staying in a rural area in Panama without access to a wired internet connection, I’ve been relying on tethered prepaid cellphone internet to work and browse the web. I only have an allowance of 200MB per day, so I’ve been learning to make the best of it.

Web Browsing

With all of the scripts, images, and videos found in most webpages these days, just browsing the internet can gobble up my precious data. This is why I had to optimize my web browser to reduce data.

An adblocker, like Adblock Plus, will block annoying ads that eat up bandwidth. The Image Block addon for Firefox will allow you to disable images on any website with a click of a button. You may also disable images under Content Settings in Google Chrome. Installing NoScript is also useful to block unwanted scripts from running in the background.

You may also consider using a text-based browser like Lynx or Links2 if you just want to read text. Many websites won’t allow you to sign in with text-based browsers unfortunately.

Discord

I wanted to continue using Discord but embedded images really started to eat up my limited data. You may disable auto-embedded media by clicking on the User Setting cog, navigating to Text & Images, and swithing off all of the options on this page.

Traffic Shaping

On Windows, you may use NetLimiter to limit your traffic for each individual application or for your entire computer. This application will allow you to visualize how much data certain programs are really using. You may be surprised how much bandwidth background applications are eating up, so you can right click and select “kill connections” to prevent them from using up more data. Antivirus updates and Java updates in particular seem to be the main culprits.

For GNU/Linux or *BSD users, Pyshaper (http://freshmeat.net/projects/pyshaper) is a simplistic and powerful bandwidth manager. You may also use Iptables to throttle traffic with the help of certain scripts.