If Your Laptop Is on the Internet on a Tethered Connection, How Do You Keep Your Data Use Down?
Ten years ago, when many people were still stuck with dial-up connections, webpages were lightweight at no more than 1 MB each. Now that broadband is widely available both to home and office users, webpages have blown up into elaborate, multiple-megabyte designs to take advantage of the available speed.
Complex webpages turn out to be a problem when you need to view them on a laptop that connects to the Internet over a tethered smartphone connection. If every webpage you open gobbles up 20 MB of your phone’s data limit, you’ll soon find yourself having to pay data overages. What you need is a way to make sure that the webpages you visit don’t use much data. Here are the best ways to achieve this aim.
Stop videos and advertisements from displaying automatically
Attractive, Flash-based advertisements are nearly universal on websites today. While these make webpages look good, they also consume a great deal of data. When your computer is on a tethered connection and you need to watch your data use, it’s a good idea to make sure that the webpages you visit don’t load Flash content.
To make this happen, you only need to install something called a click-to-play extension on your browser. Both Firefox and Chrome have these extensions. With a click-to-play plug-in installed, you only see placeholders on every point on a webpage that has Flash-based content. If you need to really see a Flash display, you just need to click on the placeholder. You don’t need to waste your data on anything else.
Turn off all images
Installing a click-to-run plug-in on your browser only turns off Flash-based images. Regular images still display. To prevent these from wasting your data allowance, you need to turn off automatic image display on each browser. On Chrome, you need to select Do not show any images under Settings . On Firefox, you need to find Load images automatically under Options and uncheck the box.
The Opera browser has a better way. When you enable the Turbo feature on Opera, it automatically compresses every image prior to transferring it to your computer. While you do lose some image quality, you end up using less data while still getting to see every image.
Don’t go to regular versions of websites – go to their mobile versions, instead
Many websites have mobile versions – versions built light with fewer flashy components to load quickly on slow, limited data connections. To view the mobile version of a website on your laptop, you need to read up on how to change a few settings on your browser’s user agent. When you do this, your laptop’s browser will announce itself as a mobile browser to the websites it goes to. Right away, you will get to see the mobile version of each website.
Disable software that tries to keep itself constantly updated
When your operating system or a program installed on your computer updates itself, it can quickly run through hundreds of megabytes of data. Unfortunately, there is no one place to go to on a computer where you can turn off all updates. You need to manually disable updating, one application at a time. To disable Windows updates, you need to go to Windows Update under Control Panel . You should also go to your browsers and other programs to disable automatic updating on them. If you have a cloud account like Dropbox or Google Drive, those need to be disabled, as well.
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