Originally posted by Winston
Ahuh the only good thing about Optus's capped scheme is, you can't go over and pay more, bloody hell Tel$luts, argghh... there ok i guess, at least we have free content 
and you guys don't lol!
I'd rather be capped to 20Kbps than pay through the nose with Telstra.
If you can't sleep at night, or if you're bored,
http://files.bigpond.com
http://games.bigpond.com (formerly Game Arena/GA)
~1MB/s transfers for Telsta BPA (or BigPond Broadband Cable now) customers... I've reached about 1.2MB/s (double download, combined download rate, no segmenting/"accelerators").
Request a bunch of legal things and start leeching (if you can call it that) at 800-900KB/s -- LOL, or visit games.bigpond.* and watch all the trailers, entertainment/movies and technology previews (but I hate that Alex Zahirov or whatever losery guy who reviews all the hardware lol... he sucks)
Back to babydoll's Qs
1. As others have mentioned, Netstats no longer exists for previous/former Optus@home (now OptusNet) customers, so you'll be on MDM (my data monitor) which stinks in comparison to netstats.
You can always limit your bandwidth using third party apps, but that only means you'll wait longer (since you're capping your downstream traffic to say, dialup speeds, which equally stinks as much as being capped is concerned).
When I'm near or reaching my limit, I turn my computer off and as Winston has said, abstain. Read a book, watch TV, catch up on some sleep, play (offline) games, or go out/play a sport, go for a walk, etc.
2. As Winston has said again, that's the method I would use to capture video shots, or you can always get other apps out there like HyperSnap DX and other image/video capturing (screenshot) apps, which will do the trick. I don't know about the Photoshop "trick" -- but I'm sure that's correct too, as I rarely ever use PS7 on the PC.
I'd always capture the video/image, save it as a bitmap and resave it (or resize it) afterwards as a JPG (same difference I suppose, the photoshop method is just another step if you're willing to take a few more seconds to do it
)
