This Feature In Windows 10 Could Be Responsible For Lower Internet Speeds On Your PC, Here’s How To Disable It

Windows could be limiting your internet speed and it’s not a bad thing. In addition, it’s a setting you can change.  This feature was actually launched on Vista and has continued till today in Windows 10. Called Window Auto-Tuning, it improves performance for programs that receive TCP (Transmission Control Protocol allows two hosts to establish a connection and exchange streams of data with guarantee of delivery)  data over a network. Microsoft explained further that “if you enable Receive Window Auto-Tuning for WinHTTP traffic, data transfers over the network may be more efficient. However, in some cases you might experience slower data transfers or loss of connectivity if your network uses an older router and firewall that does not support this feature. For example, when you use Windows Internet Explorer to access applications that are hosted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, the HTTP traffic may slow down. This occurs because certain routers do not support the Receive Window Auto-Tuning feature.”

This feature monitors routing condition like bandwidth (which is the data size your ISP provides you with at home or in the office) by adapting the receive window size of the ongoing transmission to take advantage of any unused bandwidth. As beneficial as this sounds especially in big network scenarios, disabling it give you full access to available bandwidth which translates to faster network. It is set to “normal” by default on your computer and should you choose to disable it, Microsoft support has a way for you do just that but I came across this tutorial from Ghacks which to me is an easier way to do it.

I encourage you to read the whole thing on their website but a quick one;

1. Tap on the Windows-key, type cmd.exe, hold down Shift and Ctrl keys, and hit enter.
2. Confirm the UAC prompt that opens.
3. Run the command netsh interface tcp show global.

Locate the “Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level” value under TCP Global Parameters. If it is not set to disabled, it is being used by Windows to optimize TCP connections.

You may want to disable the feature to run connection tests and see if it is the cause for the limited Internet speed that you are getting out of the connection.

Run the following command to disable Window Auto-Tuning on Windows 10:

• netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

You get ok as verification that the value was set correctly. You may verify this by running netsh interface tcp show global again.

I’ll add that you should check your internet speed before and after and while this is not guaranteed to work for all, it has for some. I can’t verify a claim online though as someone said it actually increased their netweork speed ten times while another recorded a 12Mbps speed after versus 10Mbps before. So you see it varies

No coding involved, just you and a few lines in command prompt and that’s it. Try it out and let us know if you noticed something and of course you can revert to the default setting using the same method.

Lastly there’s a couple of tools with which you can test internet speed like Xfinity Speed Test, fast.com, testmy.

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