Fix large file copying problems in Windows Vista

Out of the box Vista can have some issues with large file transfers over a network. This is because of a new Vista feature called 'receive window auto-tuning'. In a nutshell, this allows Vista to automatically scale the size of each packet of data it requests and receives over a network connection to suit the available bandwidth. This is a good thing. However, older networking hardware may have issues with this newfangled technique and refuse to co-operate, leading to dropped file transfers, slow performance and other weirdness.

If you are experiencing network issues with large file transfers and occasional connection problems with applications like Messenger, we recommend that you restrict or disable the receive window auto-tuning feature.

To do this, open a command prompt window with administrative privileges.

Type 'netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=restricted' and press Enter.

If this fixes your issues, relax. If you continue to have networking problems, open another administrative prompt and type 'netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled'.

Enable more simultaneous Downloads in Firefox

If you prefer to use Firefox (which, like IE7 defaults to only two persistent connections to a given server), here's the Firefox-approved version of the above tip:

Open Firefox and type 'about:config' in the address bar.

Scroll down to the 'network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server' entry.

Double click the entry and change the value to anywhere from 4 to 10.

Restart Firefox.

Enable more simultaneous downloads in Internet Explorer 7

As was the case with Windows XP, the version of Internet Explorer bundled with Windows Vista is limited to just two simultaneous connections to the same Internet server. This is generally fine, but it can mean that large complicated websites can take longer to open than they should, and it also means that you cannot download more than two files simultaneously from the same location. Fortunately this is easy enough to change.

To increase the number of simultaneous downloads in IE 7:

Open Regedit and navigate to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings'

Create a new Dword value called 'MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server' and give it a decimal value between 3 and 5.

Create another new Dword called 'MaxConnectionsPerServer' and give it an identical decimal value.

Close Regedit and restart IE to take better advantage of your bandwidth.