Does TCP Optimizer work?

I heard in the past that messing around with this program (ie. the TCP settings) of Windows Vista or 7 brings no benefit and can sometimes cause some harm

Has anyone had any real word experience and tested any results before/after using this utility?

Please share your findings

 

I have played around with it. Theoretically it could have an effect I suppose, but after testing it, and playing with different settings, I could not find any measurable effect.

It did spark my interest in the area of network buffering, latency, etc.

 

hello

i have a 12mb connection and on my win xp pc's i get around 700kbs download speeds depending on where i download
from and after i use tcp optimizer i get around 1.2mb downloads and videos stream better

but on my windows 7 laptop it did not make a difference

 

I always got maximum download/upload speed in Windows (and Linux). The only time I didn't was because the ISP was literally crap (in fact it wasn't that bad, they were just throttling websites like youtube, grooveshark, megavideo and a few other I can't remember, I could get maximum speed on torrents though; weird ISP).

 

In the past I have messed extensively with network tweaks. I tested settings both for internal throughput and external throughput.

It is a lot of work to truly tweak things. Many around here will say there is no use. That is fine. But I am here to tell you that should you really want to tweak your network, you can see some pretty bountiful dividends in terms of throughput.

TCP Optimizer was only useful for me to gather info from. A long time ago on 500mhz era machines when DSL was offered at a blazing 256x512, some tools such as this could make a difference. Now, I am not so sure.

As an example, I once tweaked a machine with onboard VIA Rhine 10/100 adapter, with an athlon xp2100 if memory serves. Anyway, my throughput on the lan was rougly 75-80% of the max. The different network monitors that I used and coded myself confirmed this across the board. The throughput had spikes of fast and slow. Now some of this can be related to size/amount of packets. Contiguous files generally show a more solid graph than many small ones. Anyway, after I had spent quite a few days messing and learning, I was able to get that 10/100 card to recieve data from another machine at 98%. I had screenshots to prove it at one point.

There is a lot to network tweaking. And if you are on a network, you cannot always tweak only one machine, but many, or all. And different hardware will behave differently with different options. On top of that, different drivers affect things as well. I have gone so far as to find many manufacturers drivers for the same chipset and try those. Sometimes a different manufactuers driver works better than the supplied one. Sometimes you can also go into different driver .inf files and see what a chip is capable of, and create your own driver .inf. This will do things such as state what options are available on the NIC properties. I did this because I found one driver might have only 6 advanced options and another might have 16 options. Not exactly something most people would do I suppose. It only serves to give an example that network optimization can work, but it usually, IMO, takes a lot more than just using something like TCP Optimizer if you want it to work well.

When optimizing network connections, be prepared for a lot of rebooting lol.

Sul.

 

Pretty much my experience. On XP it does seem to help, on anything newer it does not make a difference.