Obsessed as I am with a hobby which largely revolves around try to suck as many bytes of data from the ether, so that I can stare at them, and then spit some slightly modified ones back out again, I’m always keen to find new ways to increase the power of my hoovering apparatus. I’m not really that technical though, beyond the basics needed to get online and stay there, so am generally quite wary of immersing myself in the Overclocking Culture, reasoning that the gambling involved – the chance of a better PC versus the likelihood of as PC that doesn’t work at all – is a bit too, well, dicey for my liking.
However, a bit of idle surfing around the subject yesterday, turned up something quite remarkable – my internet connection is only running at half capacity! Yours too most likely, if you’ve never gone out of your way to tweak it at all. Here comes the science!
The internet is made up of hundreds of thousands of very tiny goblins. These goblins run around inside the wires and boxes that make up Greater Internetshire, all carrying little tiny sacks of Website, all chopped up in to goblin-manageable pieces. When these goblins need to make a delivery to your PC, they all come running up the wire to your modem, into the Goblin Sorting Room inside your PC, dump their sacks, grab a quick bite to eat (Rice pudding mostly) and then pick up new sacks to carry away with them. Turns out, that for Broadband setups, on a fresh Windows XP install, the sorting room is only about half as big as it needs to be!
My internets are apparently rated to 2000 goblins per second, but a quick benchmarking test showed that only around 800 goblins were able to fit in the sorting room at once, the remaining 1200 or so, unable to fit, ended up just lounging around in the wire, taking crafty cigarette breaks and playing soccer, using their little sacks as goalposts. We at Van Hemlock do not condone slacking goblins! Clearly larger sorting facilities are needed, and it turns out that renovations to this room are as simple as adding one single new entry to the Registry.
I’m always a bit scared of the Registry. Here be dragons! Much of the gibberish in there is quite capable of, and more worryingly, eagerly willing to, destroy the PC in any number of unpleasant ways, if fiddled with incompetently, often leading to the regrettable 'cleansing fire' of a complete system reinstall. Poor goblins. I usually leave well alone, figuring that the PC knows better than I do.
Then I found this website:
PCPitStop (Needs I.E.)
Of course it’s a company wanting to sell you performance tweaking applications, but they do offer free benchmark testing, and crucially, tell you what needs to be done to the Registry to be able to do this very minor procedure yourself. Run the Full Test (On their left sidebar), being sure to fill in what upload and download speeds your ISP said you would get in the boxes as they appear. The test only works in Internet Explorer, so might need to fire that thing up just this once if you’re a Firefoxist.
The final results page may prove informative in any number of unexpected ways, but the bit we’re interested in is the Internet Connection category. If it shows a yellow flag, as mine did, click on the category and somewhere to the bottom of that page will be a set-by-step guide to adding a new ‘TCPWindowSize’ parameter, along with an appropriate value.
If you don't want to take just their word for it, alternative guides to the same sort of procedure can be found here, although these are a little more technical:
SpeedGuide.net: Windows 2000/XP Registry Tweaks
BroadbandReports.com: Tweaking for speed
It’s all a bit seat of the pants stuff, and quite daunting for those of us who aren’t already The Mod-Master, but just by following the PCPitStop advice and walkthrough, my download speed, as measured on the Internet Speed sidebar test went from around 800kb/s to around 1700kb/s – effectively doubling my download speed, all without me opening the PC case, or spending a penny.
Of course this won’t make a lot of difference in everyday gaming for most people, WoW, EQ2, SWG etc all download very small amounts of goblins during play, but due to the way Second Life streams everything dynamically, it is helping me quite a bit, making the thing noticeably more responsive. And of course, all of us need to patch our games now and then, and this ought to help with that too, along with more regular download/sharing activities. I was just surprised that as a default installed state, the connection is essentially hobbled right off the bat; that can’t be right!
(Note: Further reading implies that the upcoming new Windows Vista will be capable of adjusting this parameter on the fly, based on what hardware it thinks you have, so this kind of tweaking shouldn’t be necessary. We’ll see…)
The usual disclaimers apply of course – Not My Fault if you Break Your PC, but so long as you follow the steps to backup the Registry before going at it with the proverbial axe, you should be fine. Go slowly, read carefully, and if you're at all unsure, just back out and leave it alone. 'Faster' is good, but 'Working' is better.
For reference, I’m using a (supposedly) 2mbps ADSL modem through Demon Internet, a very standard UK domestic broadband kind of set up, with Windows XP SP2 – folks looking for advice on variations of this should probably take a bit of time to surf further into the subject before starting to tweak. I’m also not affiliated with any of the above websites…I just thought it’d be a useful heads up for folks who haven’t already sorted it out.
Back to work you lazy goblins!