Windows Vista restricts network traffic to 10 packets per millisecond while playing multimedia to prevent skipping. Unfortunately this causes network speed to be pitiful on a gigabit network, especially during file copies over the network.
Service Pack 1 includes a new registry tweak that can be used to change the throttling percentage so you can at least partially fix this problem, but you should be careful to test it out, because you don’t want your audio to skip either.
Note: This setting is only really useful if you are on a gigabit network – the default values should be fine for a Wireless network.
Manual Registry Hack
Open regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
You will see a value on the right-hand side named NetworkThrottlingIndex, which can be changed to anything from 1 to 70 (decimal). I would recommend testing out different values to see what works for you. Note that you’ll need to reboot after making this change.
The Anandtech website has more information and test notes for this hack… note the difference in the graph below (from their site), the top graph is before the registry hack, and the bottom is after.
For more information you can also read the Microsoft KB article on the subject.
But depending on your home’s layout, you may miss the remote sensor support.
NOTE: You shouldn’t disable your page file unless you really really know what you are doing.
Normally we try and focus on articles about how to customize your computer, but today we’ll take a break from that and do a book review. This is something I’ve not done before, so any suggestions or questions will be welcomed in the comments.
If you want to test an explorer shell plugin or registry hack without having to log off, more technical users will usually just kill the explorer.exe process in Task Manager. Windows Vista has another way to do the same thing that you might not be aware of.
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user that regularly uses iGoogle as your dashboard, have you ever thought about combining the two? It’s nearly trivial to add your iGoogle page to Outlook and make it the startup page.
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In the never-ending quest to rid your computer of unnecessary bloat, Windows Vista has a lot less options than prior versions, but you can still get rid of some of the extra Windows components that you don’t need.
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