How in the Tech

Energize Vista’s Web Browsing

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 5, 2008 ⋅

It seems everyone’s experience with Vista is different. Some love, some hate, some are mixed – I probably fall into the latter. In an effort to improve network efficiency, Microsoft introduced a feature dubbed TCP Auto-Tuning Levels. In a perfect world, everything jives together happyly , but reality is often much different unfortunately. As it turns out, not all routers or network devices work effectively with this feature. Side effects you may  experience are slowdowns or generally poor network performance. The fix is pretty simple but it will likely require some trial and error on your part – as each network setup can be unique.

1. Open an Administrator Command Prompt – in the Start menu search box type command, but don’t click the result just yet. Rather, right click on it and choose Run As Administrator.
2. At the command prompt type: netsh interface tcp show global.
3. If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter the command: netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted



4. Evaulate your network performace and decide whether the perceived sluggishness is gone, if not, repeat step 3 with this: netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled



5. It’s possible none of these changes will make a noticeable improvement. In that case I’d recommend returning everything to normal: netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Good luck, and remember, it’s not a bug it’s a feature!