Maintain Network Speed When Playing Audio in Vista

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Maintain Network Speed When Playing Audio in Vista

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 16, 2008 ⋅

Tags: network tuning, registry editor, vista sp1, vista tips

Seems computers these days just aren’t fast enough to play music and copy large files across the network at the same time - at least that must be what Microsoft is thinking. You see, Vista restricts network traffic to 10 packets a millisecond while playing audio in order to prevent skipping. This is not what I would call effective multitasking but what do I know, I haven’t developed for the worlds largest consumer operating system. Anyways, the side effect of this artificial limit is a drastic throttling of your network speed, especially apparent when on a gigabit link.

From much “discussions” across the Internets, Microsoft concluded that this was probably not the ideal way to keep the beat bouncing, so to speak. How something of this lunacy made it out of Q&A is beyond me, but no harm I suppose as starting with Vista SP1 the impact is minimized. Though not addressed by default, through a new registry setting you are able to control the percentage of the throttling of your network.

Click Start and in the Start Search box type regedit.exe
Traverse the Registry Editor navigation tree on the left hand side down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile

Double click on the DWORD NetworkThrottlingIndex. The default value of 10 can be changed from 1 to 70 - but ensure that you are in Decimal as your base.