Dr. I Doctor
Dr. I Doctor's Informational Juggernaut
April 1, 2008
Slow File Transfers in Windows Vista
Dear Doctor,
Our branch office network recently upgraded many workstations to Windows Vista. We've noticed that file transfers to and from these machines and the Internet is much slower — about 10 times slower — than our XP and Mac machines. Yet the same machines can transfer files fine over our VPN to the home office. We use a Cisco PIX firewall for our Internet connection and a Sonicwall VPN appliance for our corporate VPN. I'm perplexed!
Gentle User,
You are not alone in your perplexity. Many Vista users have reported this problem, and Microsoft has explained the behavior and published a workaround.
Windows Vista enables a little-used TCP/IP option called Window Scaling, which allows for more than 65K in a TCP receive window. While useful for high-speed LANs, many edge devices, such as routers and firewalls, don't support this option, causing the performance problem you've observed.
The fix is to simply disable Window Scaling in Vista. You must run the following DOS command as Administrator (right-click the Command Prompt icon and choose "Run as Administrator"):
netsh interface tcp set global
autotuninglevel=disabled
Posted by mbeckman at April 1, 2008 4:32 PM
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Blog Policy
We welcome your comments and opinions and encourage lively debate on the issues. However, Penton Media reserves the right to delete or move any content that it may determine, in its sole discretion, violates or may violate its Terms of Use or is otherwise unacceptable. For more information, see Penton Media's Terms of Use.