Hack Attack : Hack Vista to Browse at High Speeds

photo credit: jpctalbot

I’m not a Windows Vista fan, but even then everyone at my home uses Windows Vista, while I dual boot with OSX on my Hackintosh.. I’ve used XP before and for some reason I always felt that Internet speeds on Vista were comparably slower than on OSX, and more so even Windows XP.

Considering it was quite slower than what I used to get on XP, I realized that Vista was doing something extra that made my internet connection slow down. After a bit of investigation and a bit of googling I found the solution.

Before I give the solution, let me explain the problem in a bit more detail… It all comes down to Vista’s “Auto Tuning” feature. Turns out that this feature isn’t compatible with many routers and networking devices(including mine). Means the feature that was supposed to be a boon turned itself into some sort of a bane.

Anyways here’s what you need to do turn off the Auto Tuning feature on Vista..

At the Start menu type command, but don’t launch the command prompt immediately. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Once the prompt is open enter the following command.

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If this doesn’t help, substitute this command and see if it works

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

At this moment, you should notice considerable improvements in your browsing speeds, or rather you should be cruising now. If it works, you should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If it doesn’t work for you, and you feel the need to put things back the way they were, you can type this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Here are screenshots showing the whole process, incase you feel the need for it..

Good luck, hope this works for you.. Please let us know if this worked for you or not..