Speed-Up DUN on Vista

My dad has three computers using Vista and I have one, and every, single one of them literally crawls across the Web on dial-up! I mean, it's flat-out ridiculous and I did a quick search to discover I was far from the first to notice it.

Having had mine on cable and DSL, I hadn't really noticed anything here, but at my folks' house, I literally could not get from one site to another! Time and again, sites would simply time-out, and I became convinced it was his connection and/or host. I had my box on dial-up for a few months right after I got it, but it was literally only a month or two, and I didn't recall it being that slow. However, when I returned to using dial-up last week, I was getting pretty much the same results as I had been down there.

I went through all the regular steps (clearing the cache, cookies, defragging, etc.) with no significant change, so I decided to go ahead and search for the tweaks I know you can employ on all the other flavors of Windows. I tried a few of them without luck before coming across the single registry tweak which made all the difference in the world:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\
• Create a DWORD value called 'TcpMaxDupAcks'
• Set it to 2
• Reboot
  

Like I say, I tried several different things without luck; this was the only tweak I found (so far) that mattered - and impressively! No more timing-out for one thing, but e-mail downloads in ¹/₂ the time, as well; this is a major improvement. I am told it may not work for everyone, so you'll just have to try it to see, but on my machine, it was a real Godsend.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009