12th December 2001

Are you "at home" with your broadband connection? No pun intended. Windows XP may be cutting 20% off the top. Unless your computer is a server of sorts, it has been recommended that you turn off QoS (Quality of Service). As Lockergnomie Leslie Smith relays: "The QoS 20% reservation in XP is mostly for its services - like Automatic Updates and various server functions. This sort of thing is done by Windows XP through the Network component known as the QoS Packet Scheduler. Look in the Properties page of your connection under My Network Places. XP still reserves this bandwidth for itself even if you don't have QoS running. To get that reserved bandwidth back, enter "GPEDIT.MSC" from the Start Menu's Run command to bring up the Group Policy Editor. Then, look under Administrative Templates \ Network \ QOS Packet Scheduler. Right-click on the "Limit Reservable Bandwidth" option and select Properties. Enable it. NOTE: enabling this won't limit your bandwidth, it just turns on the component that allows you to change the amount reserved. Now, change the amount reserved to 0% and click OK. Some systems may need to reboot to see the effect. This won't increase the speed from your ISP, but will speed up overall throughput on your PC.