How to Improve Network Performance in Windows Vista

There have been many reports on the web about networking and Windows Vista and how slow it is when moving file between your computers, especially involving gigabit networks and also to a lesser extent 100 megabit networks. If you’re a regular reader you know we discussed some ways to improve this issue by turning off RDC Remote Differential Compression and it helped a little, but for the most part the problem remained, and I learned to live with it.

Then a reader named Tarrant1701 posted a comment in my follow-up post about RDC asking about his slow networking speeds on his gigabit network and we got into a Email discussion about various web pages we’ve come across and things to try to increase his speed, the culmination of which resulted in his finding a Microsoft Knowledge Base article number 948066 that describes the problem in detail and offers a solution to fix it.

Its seems the problem stems from Multimedia programs like Windows Media Player and Media Center requiring more network resources so Vista starts throttling network packets to restrict the processing of non-multimedia network traffic. Hear’s what MS has to say about it.

The throttling will come into effect only when you are running multimedia programs that are time sensitive. However, this throttling mechanism can potentially cause a decrease in network performance during the active multimedia playback period. This decrease in performance is likely to occur only on high speed networks that are saturated to maximum capacity.

But testing done by Tarrant1701 have shown.

if I have vista media center running in the background, then I get the 16 MB/sec transfer speeds. If i completely exit out of VMC and do another transfer, then I get 35 MB/sec!
somehow, having VMC running really slows down network transfers (even though VMC itself is not actively utilizing the network at all!)

The fix involves editing the Registry to turn off Network Throttling. As always create a System Restore Point to backup your Registry, then follow the steps below.

1. Click the Start Orb and type Regedit in the search box.
2. Click Regedit.exe at the top of the search results under programs.
3. if you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
4. Navigate to the following key
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionMultimediaSystemProfile
5. In the right hand pane double click NetworkThrottlingIndex and type in FFFFFFFF (that’s 8 F’s) in the Hexadecimal field.
6. Click Ok and restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

I spoke to Tarrant1701 this morning to see if he was having any problems after about a week of use and he said

I’ve had no problems at all. Am able to watch DVR-MS files on the host HTPC and copy a different DVR-MS at 45 MB/sec to my desktop PC without any glitches.

As always your results may vary.

Microsoft says you can adjust the NetworkThrottlingIndex from 1 to 70 in the Decimal value with 10 being the default.

If you have playback problems in Media Center try adjusting the Decimal values.

in conclusion I’d like to thank Tarrant1701 for all the testing he done and help he’s provided.

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