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Page 2 of 2 What Can I Do? Tweaks... (cont.)
Wow, you should be feeling pretty good already. Now we are going to improve the way IE downloads data from web pages. If you are using Netscape, shame on you! Er, skip over this next little section. This next tweak causes IE to use more connections to the server (web page) you are viewing. This will logically make for quicker downloads of the page and connections. There are a few programs out there which do this for you as well. There's the speedguide.net web page patch, and there is a program called IE Boost. Both work very well and noticeably improve the speed of your IE browsing. Now for a manual edit, head on over to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings. Where it says MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server set those to the number you would like. 4 is the default. Setting the connections really high won't make a difference, I found that on my machine 20 is the highest it goes. I'm currently set to 16 for both. Once again, experiment a little.
Also, I suggest a web browser called Voyager 5000 made by Smartalec Corp. It's an IE based browser with skins support, lots of screen space, and is much faster than regular IE. it's well worth the 500k download. Go give it a try.
We are done with the registry now, so close regedit.
Now for the biggest increase in speed I have noticed since writing this guide, drivers... Updating the drivers on your NIC (Network Interface Card) can give you the most noticeable speed boost above everything else. Some good places to check for drivers would be: www.drivershq.com, www.download.com, and even www.altavista.com. Update those drivers for sure. To find out what kind of NIC you have, go to your control panel, system, device manager. Go down to network adapters and it will have the company and brand name if your card. Now in the same spot, highlight your NIC click properties. Then click on resources and get the IRQ (Interrupt Request) number. Close that down. Now go to Start, run, and type sysedit (hit OK). Open the system.ini window and scroll down to a header that says [386enh] and anywhere under that header put Irq##=4096 (Where ## equals the number of your NIC's IRQ) Close that down and save it. You have now allocated 4mb of memory to your network card, this should speed things up a bit.
Editor's Note: In some tests, this specific tweak has not been shown to be affective. If you find that it doesn't help performance, simply remove the entry.
Another great web browsing tweak is the hosts file. The hosts file is used to store the IP addresses of sites. This saves a lot of time for your connection because it doesn't have to go through a bunch of routers to get to the site, it just goes directly to the IP. This one takes a little bit of time to do though, but it's been well worth it for me. 1st, go into your windows directory and look for the hosts.sam (It will appear as just hosts) and make a backup of it. Then, open up a DOS prompt. (There should be a link in your start menu, but if there isn't, go to run: and type dosprmpt.) Go into the windows directory by typing cd windows at the c:\> prompt. Now, rename the hosts.sam file to just plain old hosts by typing: rename hosts.sam hosts and press enter. Now you need to open hosts. There are a couple ways to do it: You could use the edit command at the DOS prompt, or you could open it in notepad or wordpad. Since it's easier to copy paste in notepad/wordpad, go ahead and open it in that. You should now see something like this:
Now, go back to your DOS prompt, and type ping www.tweak3d.net. Using the dotted line box, highlight the IP address and press the button beside it. (The one with 2 pieces of paper)
Now go to the hosts file you have saved and paste the IP address, then press tab and enter the name of the site. Continue to do this for all of your favorite sites. (Note: This tends not to work for some site names like www.blah.com/yaya. Instead, just do www.blah.com and it will work.) After you are done, just save it and have fun browsing! If you have a problem with it, simply just restore it with the backup you made. And lastly, there's another patch you need to get. Head on over to: Speedguide again and get the VTcp.386 patch, following the instructions there. Install that and reboot. This will speed up your TCP performance because Microsoft made a math error in the first vtcp.386 file.
Conclusion
Aww, it's over! Well hopefully your cable modem should be running faster than ever before and downloads will be nearly instant (Hey, we can all dream). I'd like to thank the whole gang at TweakFiles (You know who you are) for their little tid bits of help. Have any questions or comments? Please e-mail me:
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