Is this procedure safe? I'm afraid of screwing up my newly-installed Windows XP. Is it possible to just increase bandwidth on my Internet connection side and not my OS?

Hello there, moderator? Can you please explain why limiting bandwidth is a good idea? I am not that of a computer whiz so it would be appreciated if you could explain it in an easier way.

And I do not know how to ping a website...

I've tried this a long time ago. But it hasn't really helped much. I mean, I don't find any noticable difference in the browsing speed. There is another way for speeding up browsing using firefox, but I don't remember where I read it. It's something about changing your about:config options.... something about simultaneous network connections.

Yeah, gpedit.msc is only available in XP Home OS. I don't know why soleimanian never mentions the specific XP OS that his tips can be used on. I have ran into a few where it's only for Windows XP Pro and not Home.

I'm not 100% sure on this but qwijibow seems to have answered your question earlier already. See Post #3 for more info. I think what that means is that if you max out your bandwidth, you won't be able to surf online. You will be downloading/uploading too much, which will tie up the bandwidth. I think some ISPs might cut off your internet connection or give you a call once you do this - think it's called capping.

Pinging a website is nothing more than calling out to it and getting a response back. If there's no response, it means that your signal never reached there or got lost on it's way back. To ping a website (say astahost), just go to Start->Run and type in cmd to open up the command prompt. Now type in ping www.astahost.com and hit Enter key. That should return 4 lines back. Either it will tell you the time it took to get there and come back, or it will tell you that the packet was lost somewhere along the way.

I think I know what you are talking about. Take a look at this short read:
Taken from Afterdawn site. Here is another site/blog which has some similar information on this.

You probably don't have to go through all of that mess though. I actually just found some program called Firetune (for those using Firefox) that should do this for you instantly.

There are 2 measrurements of network quality, Bandwidth and Latency.

Bandwidth = Amount of Data per second to be delivered.
Latency = the amount of time it takes a piece of data to reach its destination.

Examples.... I carry a hard drive with 200GB or data to my friends house, it takes 100 seconds to carry it there by hand.

Bandwidth = 20 Gigabytes per second !!! (Very very very fast compared to internet)
Latency = 2 minutes.. (Very very very bad compared to internet) (i walk alot slower than exectricity)

Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing you see.

If your computer is communicating with the internet slightly slower than its maximum.
then the data moves quickly.

If you are at bare maximum.. then there can be bursts where data cant be recieved fast enough, and needs to wait in a que at your internet service provider.

So for example, you might be able to download web pages slightly faster...
but when playing online games, your latency / ping / LAGG can seriously suffer.

Microsoft have setup your machine to work best alround, good throughput, and good latency.

if you remove reserve bandwidth, then throughput will increace at the cost of latency.

Im kinda reluctant to try this... i mean sure it would be great to speed up my connection but i dont know all of the technical stuff that this is messing with and i really dont need to screw up my computer.. i just had to format my hard drive and reinstall everything cuz windows xp pro freaked out and stopped workin on me... i still have some things that are wierd with it and i really dont want to make it worse....

so if the consensus is this works withought messing something up then i will give it a shot... but i wanna know if its worth it

read the posts in this topic.
Like myself and others have said, its not worth it.

Alright there, quijibow. That kinda scares me a bit. I am a gameplayer - Counter Strike, Star Wars Galaxies, Unreal Tournament 2004, Battlefield 2. So, if I remove my reserving bandwidth, are you saying that my games will lag more (network latency)??

Let's say my reserve bandwidth is at 20% and my CS game runs at 40 ping.

If I put it to 0%, about where will my CS game ping go?

Also, I don't run any downloads/webpages while I'm playing (unless I'm looking for quest help, etc). So, it won't hurt my game latency if I don't run any other internet programs, right?

Heh there - I confused myself now.



No, this will not hurt your computer at all. It will just improve your Internet performance because of the changed bandwidth settings. You are not deleting registry keys, nothing like that. Just changing some numbers. If you don't like it, you can always go back and change.



Soleimanian didn't really explain this manual very well. First of all, this manual is mainly for broadband connections. It won't work very well with dial-up or cable as much.

===TO EVERYONE===

1. You must have Windows XP Professional for this to work
2. This is for broadband users
3. Risk-free and it will NOT mess up your computer

Under some conditions. a reduction in reserve bandwidth mat cause an increace in latancy ( aka PING / LAG )

But its unlikely that your online games will use all available bandwidth, and in this case, latency may not suffer, (but you will have gained nothing from reducing reserved bandwidth)

I know this is confusing..

but whay im basically saying, in my opinion, removing the reserved bandwidth may cause a slight increace in bandwidth, but when under high load, will cause an increace in lag/ping/latency.

Ofcourse the end effect depends on many unknowns, like your ISP, how far away the server is, etc etc etc.

Why would Microsoft (who are under stong competition againsed Linux especially in the server market) delibratly reserve a little bandwidth for no reason ?

By all means experiment with this setting, try increacing a little / decreacing a little, and watcho how it effects download times, and game ping.

its always possable to tweak defaults to better match your unique situation, but i think 0% is a little drastic.

Just a side note, gpedit.msc is not available in windows xp home

Second note

A lag is different from a ping

ping is the total time it takes for a certain packet of information to send to a server and the server sending a reply. This is also called latency.

A lag is something way different, lags occur when the server cannot keep up with the amount of data it has to process and slows down terribly, like trying to run a 3d game on a very bad computer (not enough resources).

Of course, lags have kind of the same result as pings as that the time it takes to send and receive increases, but this is the fault of the server and not of your connection.

just wanted to make it clear