Windows XP helps itself to 20 per cent of your bandwidth, a useful tip at TweakXP reveals. But although this sounds like the sort of thing that could easily fuel paranoia (what's it doing with it?), it's more just a case of sloppy and wasteful configuration.
The culprit is the QoS (quality of service) packet scheduler, which is intended to preserve some available bandwidth for important applications and in order to maintain network performance. It does this for the best of reasons; in a business environment you probably don't want to have the system brought to its knees because Dave in support is busy warezing Emannuelle in Tibet (Would you believe it? This one really exists. Really.). But this doesn't necessarily apply if you're using XP at home and/or you just want to get a big file as fast as possible.
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