Ever since Vista, every time I run notepad Win calls home to Redmond to let them know I did it(non-intrusive, granted). There are ~ 40 ways Windows phones home to an MS IP when I open something or other these days. They call it 'metrics', I call it none of their business(look how they manipulate the data to say 'most users don't use start menu, anyway'...bwahahaha). TG for 3rd party firewalls, careful what you block...
Yes definitely aware of this. I ran wireshark on my workstation (MacBook) and had Windows 7 in a VBox virtual machine. The amount of network traffic it generates is insane. Prior to using the windows machine there was a little mDNS traffic and some SSDP stuff from my router/television and nothing else. Moment windows is online, thousands of packets everywhere. I didn't have time to reverse engineer what it was doing (as I was debugging an SSDP stack) but it's worrying simply from the complexity of filtering all of it.
