Windows 7 TCP/IP tweaks - Tune your internet connection

[Ben B]

Thanks so much for this, my downloads wirelessly shot up from 950kb/sec to 2.1mb/sec wirelessly!

[buckleb]

My connection does seem a little more stable, particularly when using my download manager.

My system had passed all of the online tests though (after I enabled uPNP on my router).

[AndyCalling]

Originally Posted by Pantsu-san

ahem. oh dear

Don't feel bad Pantsu. It can happen. I remember when one of the old BBC computer models was in design it was to have a rechargeable mobo battery. This was changed before release to a lithium cell, but they left the charging circuit in to save redesigning the mobo. They just deactivated it. It turned out that a piece of software released would, under certain circumstances, send the code to switch this back on. This was discovered because some owners triggered the recharge circuit in this manner and then found that a little while later their computer exploded. This came as a shock, I can tell you.

So, anything's possible. Still, if a Microsoft test was blowing up routers all over the world you can bet you would have heard about it on the news by now.

Nice to hear the tweaks are working for some. I believe they should be right for most, so feel free to add feedback especially if any particular option is causing you trouble. I'm especially keen to hear from anyone who gets problems from turning on DCA.

[Pantsu-san]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

Don't feel bad Pantsu.

Uhmm, I don't? I replied like I did as I was shocked (and included the 'shocked' smiley) that you actually believed me and thought I was being serious. You obviously have never seen me complaining about Netgear's WNR2000 a number of times on this forum and complaining of how it chokes when you go near it with any amount of traffic - hence my joke about it popping a capacitor and catching fire.

Actually, mine did catch fire, but that was helped by the petrol that I poured over it right after I bought a D-Link. THIS IS A JOKE, BY THE WAY (pointed out in case you believe me and report me to some authority for breaking a law)

Sorry if I confused you with my attempt of humour - It seemed so obvious to me that I was taking the ****. And I'm kinda amazed at how you thought I wasn't.

[Matty_]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

I'm also interested in hearing what happens if Comodo is switched off as I don't have that and it could be a factor.

Oh, and Matty, what's your router?

I might give it another go with CIS installed and not, also play with the settings. Anyway the router is a d-link dir300 (nowt special but does for me) wireless is not turned on (all is hard wired) Upnp is off. Also in 7 DNS cache is turned off.
Allthough to be honest whenever i do a speed test it gives ~10MB which is what i am on, it`s just the upload speeed which is poor and that seems to be a Virgin cable thing...!

[AndyCalling]

Originally Posted by Pantsu-san

Sorry if I confused you with my attempt of humour - It seemed so obvious to me that I was taking the ****. And I'm kinda amazed at how you thought I wasn't.

Ah, sorry for being so thick. I'm used so expecting such responses at work. There's always someone who wants to start alarm over some 'misunderstanding' or other. My astonishment threshold is really quite high now, sol end up taking the ridiculous seriously.

I've not been reading many posts about that router as I don't have it or a 50 meg connection. So I won't have seen your trials with the Netgear.

---------- Post added at 01:22 ---------- Previous post was at 01:11 ----------

Originally Posted by Matty_

I might give it another go with CIS installed and not, also play with the settings. Anyway the router is a d-link dir300 (nowt special but does for me) wireless is not turned on (all is hard wired) Upnp is off. Also in 7 DNS cache is turned off.
Allthough to be honest whenever i do a speed test it gives ~10MB which is what i am on, it`s just the upload speeed which is poor and that seems to be a Virgin cable thing...!

Good luck. It's always fun to experiment. Tell us how you get on. The more info the better.

[burninice]

Dragon Age: Origins won't connect to EA online or profile (Doing for Google)

Alright well here is something strange. I've been running these tweaks for a couple of weeks. Playing World of Warcraft and a few other online games fine. I just got Dragon Age: Origins and I could not get it to connect online. I tried everything I could think of and went through my router, firewall etc. Tested each change. No luck. I ran the revert script here as a final try. Problem fixed.

Throughout the test I tried manually going to where the game tries to go which is https://profile.ea.com and I could not get there. I also tried pinging it and got varied results. Of either time outs or pinging correctly.

What caused this guys? I'm pretty sure my router supports ECN.....but not entirely sure. I'm using a Netcomm NB6PLUS4W with a Netgear WG111v3 Wireless Adapter on Win7.

Thanks.

[AndyCalling]

Yep, specifically it's the 'netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=enabled' that kills https://profile.ea.com for me. Never seen this with other web sites before. Clearly this shouldn't happen with ECN, so I'm enclined to blame the web site.

Anyone still running Vista that can see if it's working for them? If it works with Vista when ECN is on then it's probably Win7 at fault. If not, I suspect the web site/server is at fault.

UPDATE:

Looks like others on the net have found the same with this web site:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...1011770&page=2

It looks like the finger is certainly being pointed at the web site. If you have Dragon Age you'll have to turn off ECN and moan at EA until they fix their server. You can still use the other tweaks though, CTCP being worth while alone. You could even write a batch file to switch ECN off and on when needed for when you want to play that game.

This seems to be an isolated issue.

[bomber_g]

Originally Posted by AndyCalling

Addition: Auto tuning level is usually best set to normal, but Windows can change this if it feels the network conditions warrant it. Vista tends to shift to Highly Restricted for this setting on occasion. I suspect due to boot up choices whilst things are getting it together and being dead laggy (such is a Vista boot). You need to check if your connection suddenly goes slow because this is often the issue, though some routers seem to cause it more than others. Win7 appears to be less judgemental, and I've not seen this over sensative behaviour from it so far. A nice improvment.

Hi there, I know windows Vista automatically changes TCP window sizes and mtu sizes etc automatically to 'tune' the connection.

Do you have any idea how you can check it's current settings and switch things off on etc . I don't actually have Vista but I can see this as being a useful way of finding out a little bit about a machine I'm working with - and as I'm lazy, asking you will save me having to find out myself :p

[AndyCalling]

Firstly, Vista does auto tune RWIN but is dead twitchy and conservative, which is why it sometimes switches to 'Highly Restricted' for the session during boot or some minor glitch later on in the session and then won't switch back automatically with ease. It is for this reason that the occasional check with my script is very useful for Vista so you can switch back to 'Normal' if it goes quirky. Having a setting of 'Highly Restricted' will really slow you down, and this solves a lot of Vista speed complaints. It is a pain to baby sit, but the solution seems to be Windows 7 which has not done this to me yet at all.

The settings available for the auto tuning level are as follows:

disabled: Fix the receive window at its default value of 65536 bytes which you can't then change as far as I can tell except by choosing one of the following options.

highlyrestricted: Allow the receive window to grow beyond its default value, but do so very conservatively.

restricted: Allow the receive window to grow beyond its default value, but limit such growth in some scenarios.

normal: Allow the receive window to grow to accommodate almost all scenarios.

experimental: Allow the receive window to grow to accommodate extreme scenarios.
WARNING: This can dramatically degrade performance in common scenarios and should
only be used for research purposes.

Use the Tweak Test from the following site to guage the effects:

http://www.dslreports.com/tools

Have fun experimenting with that last setting ~

[bomber_g]

is there a command that allows you to see current setting though?

Also are you positive their isn't a way to disable the Auto and then manually set things? I'm pretty sure I can do a better job of tweaking things than Vista :/

[NickFie]

Microsoft this week closed my IE performance support case - they told me about a not-yet-published RegEdit that allows IE8 to use the full extent of TCP autotuning.

Without the RegEdit, IE on Windows Vista or 7 limits windowsize to 256 KBytes. This cuts throughput in many high-bandwidth / high latency scenarios. At my employer our standard Windows XP tuning suite significantly out-performed IE on Vista or 7.

I now achieve sustained wire-speed HTTP data transfers in Windows 7 with the RegEdit, the Netsh commands here, up-to-date NIC drivers (from the NIC vendor's website) and aggressive settings within Advanced NIC properties.

Details and discussion:
[Info] IE8 Unleashed on Windows 7 - dslreports.com

Definitely worth adding to your standard Windows 7 tuning.

---------- Post added 20-11-2009 at 00:07 ---------- Previous post was 19-11-2009 at 23:54 ----------

Just ran simple speed test using this site's tool. I have 25 Mbps home broadband, generally sustain slightly higher throughput. The test reported 23.91 Mbps and ping time is 97 msec. IE 8 advertised a 1.3 MByte receive window during that transfer. Would not have been possible without the new MS regedit.

[mufaa]

Hey, thanks for the tweak. One question: How do i know i have applied these settings? When i run the file normally and as administrator, the message inside the cmd box is the same, "This only succeeds when run as administrator..[blah]".

I have run it as administrator, and click continue till the cmd box disappeared. Have i applied the settings properly?

[Pyr0]

lol, i had been wondering why i could no longer sign in to ea nation in nfs shift
thanks for the tips

[caph]

For anyone wondering what the different settings are and wanting to experiment further, here's the latest official documentation:-

Netsh commands for Interface Transmission Control Protocol