Thursday, October 14, 2010

Two quick clicks within Win7's Advanced sharing settings can boost LAN throughput by as much as 12%.

I wrote the free (no subscription required) "Top Story" in this week's WindowsSecrets.com newsletter:
One of the oddest glitches I've encountered with Microsoft's newest OS is erratic local-networking performance. Occasionally and for no obvious reason, a Win7 LAN connection will slow to a crawl — giving you that less-than-nostalgic feeling that you've gone back to a dial-up connection.

The problem seems completely random; I've never been able to reliably reproduce it. But I've seen the problem enough to know it's not some figment of my imagination. And even when everything's operating normally, I've had a sneaking suspicion that my Win7 networking is running slower than it should.

Trust me; I'm not alone in this belief. Do a quick search on the phrase win7 slow network and you'll see what I mean.

I've always suspected that the prime suspect in Win7's sometimes-sluggish network speed is the OS's HomeGroup feature, which is enabled by default. A homegroup is a kind of self-configuring workgroup that automatically sets up file- and device-sharing between Win7 machines on a local network.

But all of this was speculation — an educated guess. The only sure way to know was through testing.

So, I cooked up a series of tests and found that changing just 2 settings in Win7 takes the brakes off its LAN performance, speeding throughput by about 12%. The change is free, nondestructive, reversible, and only takes about 30 seconds!

Give it a try!

http://windowssecrets.com/2010/10/14/01-Simple-change-in-settings-pumps-up-Win7-networks

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My regular Q&A column also appears in that issue. Here's the full issue rundown:

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Full issue contents:
http://windowssecrets.com/2010/10/14

Posted via email from Fred's posterous

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