It wasn’t that long ago that computers were designed to spend most of their time offline, connected to the internet and network for short periods of time only. Nowadays, the rise of wireless broadband connections means our computers spend almost all of their time connected to other PCs and the wider net, which makes them vulnerable to all kinds of threats.

You might be surprised to discover what programs spend their time connected to the internet while Windows is running – TCPView is designed to give you a quick at-an-glance view of what connections have been made, and enable you to quickly flush out suspicious-looking applications. Not only are networked processes identified by the program, it also reveals details of the local connection, who or what they’re connected to, what kind of connection it is and what kind of behaviour is going on. The program allows you to double-click a process to reveal more about it, and there’s a handy End Process button should you decide you don’t like what’s going on.

It’s no substitute for a dedicated security suite, but TCPView is a useful tool that might help you trace network-related problems to their source, enabling you to recover network bandwidth or identify a malicious process. For more details on using the program, click here.