See DRASTIC Speed Improvements in Vista

One of the biggest complaints I’ve both heard and personally seen with Windows Vista is that sometimes navigating through a file directory structure is agonizingly slow.

Here’s a fix we’ve stumbled across that makes a DRASTIC speed increase for this process. The solution was found on Microsoft TechNet and is amazing in the comparative results that are noticed.

Please perform the following actions to check the result:

1. Turn off Auto Tuning on the Windows Vista machine:
   • Click Start, and type cmd in the Start Search box.
   • Right-click the cmd icon, and select Run as Administrator.
   • In the Command Prompt, type the following command:
     netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
   • After that, please check the result.
     Note: Please re-enable Auto Tuning by typing the following command if the above steps cannot fix the issue:
     netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
     
2. Install the updates KB938194 and KB938979 on the Windows Vista machine.
   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194
   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979

On the one laptop we’ve tested this on the results of changing this setting were absolutely amazing. It felt like an upgrade of tripling the RAM on a machine that was only running 128MB.

Vista is still fast when you change it back as well

One thing we changed that wasn’t mentioned above is that after we tried it, we changed the setting back on the autotuninglevel = normal. The speed improvements were still noticed. It’s almost like the system had to flush a file or something.

Regardless, if you find yourself waiting seconds for directory files to open and display folders, try this fix and let us know what you think.

I should also say something like it may not work for you and I’m not responsible if it blows up your computer. I’m still shocked at the difference I just saw though, and it wasn’t my laptop.