Any truth to this...

[jefexp]

Faster Network: Turn off quality of service (QoS) in Windows XP Professional to speed up networking by 20% ?but don?t turn it off in Networking Properties.? Choose Start, Run and type gpedit.msc to run the local Group policy Editor. Open Computer configuration, Administrative Templates, Networks, QoS Packet Scheduler, Limit reservable bandwith.
Set this to Enabled, then take the Bandwith limit from 20% down to 0%

this is true, turn it off

[jefexp]

I did it, and it seems like my connection is faster, but I might just be fooling myself into believing it.

Why would MS have 20% of the bandwidth held back on default?

[unicorn]

I really doubt this. From some different sources I've learned that the are talking about 20% off of the hardware capacity, ie mostly 20% off from those 100 Mbit/sec your NIC should be able to handle. That should leave something like 80 Mbit left for your network tasks. Not many have that kind of speed at the Net.
Again, it's hard to know the whole truth. What I know is that I can download with 125 kByte/sec now, exactly the same as with this service in default configuration.
I'm sorry for not giving any link to any source, I have forgotten it as it suddenly was to no interest any more.

Quote:

really doubt this

Its true uni take my word for it

Zo

XP seems to want to reserve 20% of the bandwidth for itself even with QoS disabled. So why not use it to your advantage. To demonstrate the problem, start up a big download from a server with an FTP client. Try to find a server that doesn't max out your bandwidth. In this case you want a slow to medium speed server to demonstrate this. Let it run for a couple of minutes to get stable. The start up another download from the same server with another instance of your FTP client. You will notice that the available bandwidth is now being fought over and one of the clients download will be very slow or both will slow down when they should both be using the available bandwidth. Using this "tweak" both clients will have a fair share of the bandwidth and will not fight over the bandwidth.

[Jessica]

isnt it only for the QoS enabled networks that it does that....?

[jefexp]

Look at this article in the MS Knowledge base, it directly rebuffs any theorys that turning it off will affect speed:

hxxp://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q316666

Here is a quote form the MS article:

"There have been claims in various published technical articles and newsgroup postings that Windows XP always reserves 20 percent of the available bandwidth for QoS. These claims are incorrect. The information in the "Clarification about QoS in End Computers That Are Running Windows XP" section of this article correctly describes the behavior of Windows XP systems. "

Of course they would say that, so I am still confused. Does any know if it really helps having it disabled or not????????

[unicorn]

The info given by jefex is what I have read before. Now, when I've had some more time to think about it I also recall redaing something about this at on of theese "XP-xxx" sites.
Allthough I would like to believe you, Zonko, in this case I think you are wrong.

Then it is also easu to understand that the average home-user hardly need the QoS-service. Disable it, but do not expect any performance boost.

[largeknob]

Your part right and part wrong. QoS only applies to QoS aware applications. the wrong part is that just doing the gpedit.msc part. There is a second part to the tweak. A guy named Spooky over at wxperience originated the tweak. Go on over there and search for it under his name. He fully explains the tweak in a two part post made about two weeks before winXP went gold. Evidently he is a beta tester.

It has been discovered that on a small majority of NIC cards there does appear to be a slight boost in speed. If I remember correctly it concerns some intel and 3com cards - the high end cards - that have the fancy on board memory / processor and stuff. It seems that part of the rom on the card contains some code that is in fact QoS aware. I dont know the all in all of it, but MS also did some test results which appeared late last year on that UK news page - cant remember the name of it right now, and there was a small blurb about it on tech TV as well about a week after they debunked the QoS thing.

About 99.9% of the users out there will never see a true speed boost in their connections from this. But...there are certain parts of a default XP install that are QoS aware to a certain degree, to what degree I dont know, but this was also bought up on tech TV last year. As you can probably tell I watch a lot of the tech tv . Anyway, the parts that are QoS aware in a little way are some of the serveices that run. So if you disable this in gpedit.msc some people see a slight apparent boost in computer operation, which in some ways helps equate to a slight connection speed boost some times because now the OS doesn't have to worry about the QoS any more. Or something like that.

I'm trying to recall all this from memory. sorry if I may have mis-directed or I may have even got some of it a little wrong, but for the most part I think a lot of its correct.