The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Is there a rule of thumb as to the amount of data usage between these 2 devices when access the 'net through a smartphone? Iow, I would think accessing the 'net with my laptop through my phone would use more data than if I were accessing the 'net through my phone only, but how great a difference would I expect that to be?
Accessing the internet with your laptop will indeed use more data because there are lots of things that want to download updates on regular basis. Even if you use Win 8 or Win 10 which allows you to mark a connection as "cellular" or whatever it's called - which limits the amount of data transferred by Windows itself, it still won't stop third party apps from generating their own traffic.
It's impossible to say how much more that would be compared to just browsing on the phone since it depends on your setup and applications that you have running.
The same actions like browsing a desktop version of a website or sending an e-mail will generate the same amount of traffic on the phone and on the computer, but the things that happen in the background will not.
There is no answer to your question - because the difference depends on what apps are you running and how much traffic that requires.
Even such things as using a different antivirus will cause differences - steaming from different sizes of updates and different frequency at which those updates are issued.
Copy that, downloads. .. appreciate the feedback. Thank you for the tip on marking my connection as cellular. I'll definitely consider that to save some data.
.. appreciate the tip on "full desktop". I'll keep that in mind to hopefully save some data.
Add to that, you get more adverts on laptops and videos will automatically stream on websites when you access them from a laptop vs accessing them from your smartphone. Websites can detect the kind of device they are being displayed upon, but they don't know how the connection is made.
Another potentially relevent issue is that the wireless mobile network might have a higher package loss rate, and sometimes data that doesn't go through is still counted by your ISP. The actual amount of useful data is the same but you can get charged for more.
Desktop Opera browser had (does it still have? I'm too lazy to check right now) the turbo mode. Using it page requests went thru a proxy that would slimline the pages, shrink images etc. If it's still available, that could be a viable option for most browsing.
I've used Firefox with FlashBlock and AdBlock Plus to minimise the amount of unwanted page content being downloaded. Nonetheless, pages being served to computers tend to be quite bulky while those specifically served to phones are smaller. Some websites are now blocking adblockers but that's their loss - I go elsewhere.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
