[Shasown]

Originally Posted by fingers

At the risk of sounding stupid, 2 questions: does sending/receiving files via Yahoo Messenger (or any other messenger) and receiving/sending large files via email affect your bandwidth usage?

The answer is yes.

What exactly do you mean by bandwidth? Do you actually mean monthly limitations imposed by your ISP? Thats not really bandwidth but yes transferring files to and from your computer either through a messenger program or through a downloading program like torrents or a download manager will all count towards your monthly limitations

If you actually mean Bandwidth proper, that is the rate that data can transfer to and from your computer, again yes if you are using all your bandwidth (data transfer speed) to upload or download files via a file transfer protocol etc then using a messenger or any other program that acesses the internet may reduce the maximum speed you transfer information.

In other words the more programs you have accessing the internet at any one time the less bandwidth you will have available for file transfers.