Speed Up Windows Vista Network Performance with TCP Windows Tuning
Microsoft KB article 929868 describes a problem which will cause you to experience very slow browsing on certain websites when using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, and eventually the website might even drop the data completely. The cause is that by default, Windows Vista Enterprise fully supports RFC 1323 and supports a Windows Scaling factor of 8. This issue occurs when a Web site does not fully support RFC 1323 or when a Web site does not support the default scaling factor.
THE QUICK FIX
To work around the slow browsing issue change the Windows Scaling to a factor of 2. First open and Administrator command line prompt. Click Start –> All Programs –> Accessories, right click Command Prompt, then left click Run as administrator. As an alternative you can click Start then type into the Start Search box, or the Run box, cmd, then use the shortcut keys Ctrl-Shift-Enter. (NOTE: After you set a new autotuninglevel you will need to reboot in order for the changes to take effect.)
Type, or copy and paste, into the Administrator command prompt window:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted
This will set the autotuninglevel to “Allow the receive window to grow beyond its default value, but do so very conservatively”. In this mode, Vista will by default use RWIN of 16,384 bytes with a scale factor of 2.
MORE AUTOTUNING OPTIONS
To restore the autotuninglevel back to the default setting type, or copy and paste into the Administrator command prompt window:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
There have been reports that disabling the autotuning feature will speed up threaded network downloads, mostly used with downloading agents and per-to-peer networking, along with great improvement to file copying on your network. Vista has issues where it will hang to a file copying task, but Service Pack 1, which is coming out in less than a month, is expected to fix this issue. There have been other reports that say disabling the autotuning of TCP can also fix other Vista specific issues related to slow file transfer between Outlook 2007, and Exchange server connections.
You can disable autotuning with the following command:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
When autotuning is disabled, the RWIN receive window defaults to a value of 65536 bytes.
There are two more settings. First restricted:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=restricted
Restricted allows for the receive window to grow beyond the default value, but limits such growth in some scenarios.
Second is experimental:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=experimental
Allows for the receive window to grow to accommodate extreme scenarios. Note The experimental value can decrease performance in common scenarios. This value should be used only for research purposes, and is not suitable for most common uses like general web browsing.
NOTE: Vista may have autotuning disabled by default, unless you use Diagnose and repair for a network connection, which will cause Vista to enable autotuning using the “normal” autotuninglevel.
Tags:autotuning, cmd, command, connection, fix, Internet, internet explorer, internet explorer 7, Microsoft, Network, networking, Performance, reboot, shortcut keys, speed, TCP, Windows, windows vista
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Tried these tips & they do SFA because after you have been on line for about 20 minutes vista reconfigures them back to how they where before the changes where made. The only way to do it is to use the dissable string, but then it stuffs up other things so I don’t recomend doing any of these tweaks. Wait for SP1 if they ever fix it so it doesn’t do more harm than good to your PC
February 24th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Actually after trying this tweak for 3 hours and then switching back to the default setting it is quite obvious that PC browsing and general internet communication is quicker using the default settings,,MUCH QUICKER.
this tweak is a dog