Tips on speeding up your Windows cable or DSL connection

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The most basic change is a single additional entry in SYSTEM.INI.

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Site has great tips on speeding up your Windows cable or DSL connection

July 30, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Want more speed from your cable or DSL connection? If your PC is running Windows, you should be able to tweak your Internet connection quite a bit.
   The Internet networking code in Windows is designed for the speed of standard modem connections. These range from 14.4 to 56 kilobits per second. Cable and DSL connections are much faster, ranging up to many megabits per second.
   But hidden away in Windows are ways to speed up the flow of data when your computer is connected to the Internet by cable or DSL. If you add those hidden tweaks to some common-sense adjustments within Windows, you're likely to see al least a 10 percent boost. Some users report an increase of 25 percent or more.
   Cable Internet users have been looking for ways to boost their speeds for the last few years. I described some helpful tweaks in a 1998 article. (You can read it at my site. Go to http://twcny.rr.com/technofile/net.html and scroll down the list. Click on the link called "Setting TCP parameters for cable modems in Windows 95 and 98.")
   We know a lot more these days about what works and what doesn't. Computers have improved, too. They're much faster, on average, than they were a few years ago. This translates to extra muscle when shuffling data back and forth within the computer, but it also has raised our expectations. Because our computers are faster at everything else, we expect them to be faster in their connection speeds, too. When they're not, we can get frustrated.
   So cut back on the frustration level with some free speed tweaks for Windows 95 and Windows 98. Some of them work for Windows 2000, too. (Macintosh and Linux computers aren't covered in these tweaks.)
   The most helpful tweaks come from a Web site devoted to solving the problems of high-speed Internet connections for Windows. It's SpeedGuide at http://www.speedguide.net. Click the link named "Cable modems/DSL" for the tweaks.
   The tweaks described at SpeedGuide range from a simple change to a text file used by Windows to advanced changes in the Windows Registry. (The Registry is a set of files where Windows stores everything it knows.) The Registry changes don't require much work, but be sure you have an easy way to restore Windows before you make any changes to the Registry. If you don't have a restore CD or an image copy of your C: drive, you can't blame anyone but yourself if things go wrong and you're left with a non-functioning Windows PC.
   The most basic change is a single additional entry in SYSTEM.INI, a text file Windows consults each time it starts up. It tells Windows to make a large buffer -- a storage area in memory -- for the network card used for cable and DSL connections. The large buffer keeps everything flowing in and out no matter how busy Windows is.
   The SpeedGuide site explains how to make the change to SYSTEM.INI. The number used in the example is 4096, representing a 4-megabyte buffer. If your PC has more than 64 megabytes of memory, you might want to try a larger number. Use multiples of 1024, such as 5120 and 7168.
   If you don't get an increase in speed from the SYSTEM.INI change, put "REM" followed by a space in front of the line that contains the tweak in SYSTEM.INI. This will disable the change while keeping it available in case you want to try it aghain later. "REM" stands for "remark," and is the standard way of disabling instructions in Windows system texts. (They include AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS and the two main INI files, SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI.) You will then free up the memory used by the tweak.
   SpeedGuide is a great resource in other ways, too. You'll find reviews of hardware and software relating to cable and DSL connections along with general performance tweaks for Windows.