Internet packets received should be much more than packets sent - Right?!?

Question

My understanding of how surfing the net occurs, is that your PC sends a request for a page and it receives that page. Clearly the amount of data required for the request would be dwarfed by the amount of data downloaded to the PC to display the page which is usually filled with images and banner ads. So what is going on when packets sent are 50% of packets received, or they are about the same, or packets sent even exceeds packets received?

Answer 1

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It depends on how much uploading you're doing. It could be Flickr photos, YouTube videos, or you have a virus sending out rogue emails. There's nothing wrong with having more sent packets than received packets.

Answer 2

You're correct in the basics.
There is no direct ratio between sent and received packets, so no direct mathematical correlation can be made.
One (of several) possibilities is you have a "Zombie"...a unit that has been commandeered by a bot for use in DDoS assaults, but other non-sinister things could be a solution.
Check your Task Manager or perhaps the Firewall log and see what's accessing the 'net. that may help determine what's going on.