Quick Vista Hack to Get You Browsing at High-Speed Again

April 17, 2008 – 9:09 AM

I’m not a Windows Vista fan. In fact, my new PC runs on XP, but uses OpenSource applications for most of my business needs. So why do I even care about a trick to get sluggish Vista browsing back to an acceptable speed? My mom uses Vista, and I love my mom.

I’m also no techie, so I’ll preface this piece by acknowledging that this won’t work for everyone. There are lots of reasons why Vista is a good choice for some; my mom has few qualms with the operating system, and I’ve even adjusted to using her PC for quick tasks when I’m away from home. One thing that just wouldn’t do for me or my mother, however, was the horribly slow browsing in Vista. Sites that should have taken little time to load were met with the white screen of death, or a notoriously lingering blue circle that signaled the page was still loading. A check of the connection supported my theory that it wasn’t anything else but Vista. Here’s how we fixed it – for good.

PC Magazine’s May 2008 issue held the key to our problems. Its Ask Neil column featured our problem, and the answer was simple: Disable Vista’s “Auto-Tuning” feature, which may not be (in our case it wasn’t) compatible with certain routers and networking devices. To turn it off:

At the Start menu type command, but don’t immediately launch the command prompt. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Type this 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, do the whole process again, but this time substitute this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

Viola! You should be cruising now! (By the way, I had to go through the whole process, using the last command to get it going good.) 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

Good luck, Vista users!

Source: Wise Bread