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Slow Browsing of Network Drives

December 16th, 2007 Leave a comment Go to comments

One frustrating thing I noticed after using Vista was what seemed to be a compatibility issue with Windows 2003 Server 64bit Edition. Browsing network shares and folders on the server from the Vista machine was painfully slow. It would take five plus seconds to just display a directory listing or open a text file. After an hour or so of searching Google I found the answer.

The fix involves changing two settings from the command prompt. You need to run the command prompt as an administrator. You can do this by right-clicking and selecting run as administrator. Type in the following commands

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh int tcp set global rss=disabled

You will need to restart your machine afterwards. The difference is night and day. I wonder what the reasoning was for not having Vista set like this out of the box?

If you are unhappy with the changes you can restore the default settings with

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
netsh int tcp set global rss=enabled
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  1. MuddyFox
    May 23rd, 2008 at 05:32 | #1

    That works!!
    Although, it was running fine yesterday afternoon, then it started to slow down to a crawl.
    I dont know whether it’s related or not, but it seems that this problem is travelling from computer to computer. I have staff complaining of slow browsing the network, then after a few days they are OK. The problem then goes to someone else.
    I wonder, if a virus or hack going on in this network.

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