What is causing a continuous rate of data exchange?

Not sure what "Av" is, but I know that programs regularly update. The lights on the router don't stop blinking at a rapid rate, though, and before a couple days ago, they only blinked at this rate on occasion.

Not sure what you mean by "tiles", Exactly what did you delete?
thanks,

Picture at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zxue/archive/2012/03/07/win8-howto-1-switch-between-metro-ui-and-desktop.aspx

Thanks for the pic. By 'tiles' you mean the app icons on the start page. many of those are apps that I don't use and can safely delete. Others are shortcuts to applications I do use and don't want to delete. My issue is that for the first nine months I owned this computer, my router lights did not blink constantly at a high rate of speed. Three days ago they started constantly. So something has changed. some application or program is communicating much more frequently than before. Again, I've found no virus, spyware, or malware so I don't think it's anything nefarious. But I'd like to be able to correct the issue. Appreciate your comment, though.

So unless you turn off all those tiles, they can chat to the web to update content. That's also Windows Updates that eat a lot.

In Windows 8.1, I can open task manager and see what programs are utilizing the CPU and internet time, but I can't tell which is causing the problem. I did open Command Prompt and type in "netstat -aon". A list of IP addresses my portal was contacting was listed. also the status. I don't think I was able to interpret the data completely. My contact at Dell premium tech support wasn't sure. They are investigating and said they'd get back to me. Since my pc isn't showing any signs of difficulty, they were reluctant to continue, but I persuaded them that this behavior was different than normal.

In the processes tab of Task Manager in https://www.winhelp.us/task-manager-and-resource-monitor-in-windows.html I see the last column has the Mbps per process. Doesn't that tell you what you want to know: which processes are responsible for the data usage?

Kees

I think you pointed me in the right direction. I opened task manager and in the first tab, processes, I found only one application with active use of internet resources, although only at 0.1 mbs. I right clicked on that app and selected 'end task'. the constant blinking stopped. This was a tool installed by Dell premium support to diagnose problems. They uninstalled it in the past, but left it there this time. I'm going to uninstall it. As I was typing this I noticed the blinking became constant again; went back to task manager and the app had started again.

YIu shoukd be able (either on your own or with some help of Dell) to find the name of that process and how it is started. The quick and dirty solution - if uninstalling doesn't work - is to just rename the executable and see if that gives any fatal errors. If it's limited to a warning at start-up you might prefer that above the continuous data transfer, while Dell thinks about how to totally erase it.

Kees