The second biggest thing you can do to improve your Internet speed is to change your TCP/IP settings. However, if you can't get speeds in the neighborhood of 300K with or without the Proxy Server settings - you may not need to go any further - your Internet connection might not be fast enough to support these modifications.

If you're running Windows NT 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 & SE, Windows ME or Windows 2000 - you'll certainly want to make a few basic changes to your operating system to take full advantage of your broadband connection. This is needed because older Windows operating systems have been designed for slower dial-up Internet connections and this design hampers your new high-speed access. Generally speaking, the older your O/S is the more it will respond to tweaking.

My Shaw Internet connection usually runs at an average of 600K download speed but if I install Windows 98 that speed will drop to 300K. By making a simple registry change in Windows 98 it will come back up to 600K. That's a 100% increase and a 300K improvement over and above the stock Operating System.

Without exception, the modifications for each Microsoft Operating System listed below deals with creating or changing the receive window setting. Many web sites will recommend changing numerous other registry settings or running the largest RWIN you can. I don't recommend that as most of the other changes do not result in any significant increase in speed and can cause problems. Complete un-install files are included for each O/S.

Windows NT 3.1 & 3.5x

The Microsoft White Papers on TCP/IP contain a nice description of what the Receive Window setting does...

"This parameter determines the maximum TCP receive window size offered by the system. The receive window specifies the number of bytes a sender may transmit without receiving an acknowledgment. In general, larger receive windows will improve performance over high delay, high bandwidth networks (such as the Internet). For greatest efficiency, the receive window should be an even multiple of the TCP Maximum Segment Size (MSS).

Reducing the TCP Window size effectively causes an acknowledgment to be sent to the sender for data received sooner. This will lower the possibility that the sender will time out while waiting for an acknowledgment. However it will also increase the amount of network traffic and cause slower throughput."

I strongly recommend using the custom RWIN settings that I've listed above for you Operating System. If you would like to experiment though, I've put together a custom page showing all the commonly used (and not so common) RWIN sizes.

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