Vista optimized for high speed internet?

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tornadotsunamilife

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I remember reading awhile a go that Vista is more optimized for broadband and such compared to what XP was. Can anyone confirm this? Anyone noticed a litle speed boost with their connection when switching from XP to Vista?
 
The TCP/IP stack has been rewritten and improved. I swear my newsgroup, ftp and http file transfers improved a bit over when I was running XP but that could just be network conditions although since switching OSs the speed has been consistent. Browsing is the same as I still wait for the webserver to send me information.
 
Yes, everything seems faster, including my wired LAN. All the eye candy and new stuff that comes with Vista is pretty cool but the upgraded networking is what I've noticed more than anything.

from MSTechNet -
Receive Windows in the Next Generation TCP/IP Stack
To solve the problem of correctly determining the value of the maximum receive window size for a connection based on the current conditions of the network, the Next Generation TCP/IP stack supports Receive Window Auto-Tuning. Receive Window Auto-Tuning continually determines the optimal receive window size by measuring the bandwidth-delay product and the application retrieve rate, and adjusts the maximum receive window size based on changing network conditions.

Receive Window Auto-Tuning enables TCP window scaling by default, allowing up to a 16 MB window size. As the data flows over the connection, the Next Generation TCP/IP stack monitors the connection, measures the current bandwidth-delay product for the connection and the application receive rate, and adjusts the receive window size to optimize throughput. The Next Generation TCP/IP stack no longer uses the TCPWindowSize registry values.

With better throughput between TCP peers, the utilization of network bandwidth increases during data transfer. If all the applications are optimized to receive TCP data, then the overall utilization of the network can increase substantially, making the use of Quality of Service (QoS) more important on networks that are operating at or near capacity.
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Excavator said:
Yes, everything seems faster, including my wired LAN. All the eye candy and new stuff that comes with Vista is pretty cool but the upgraded networking is what I've noticed more than anything.

from MSTechNet -
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If you are running Vista with the rig in your sig, are you seeing 4GB in windows?
 
While I don't have any quantifiable data to present on this, here's my recent experience with some ad hoc testing.

Recently my Wife and I both owned 20" Core 2 Duo iMacs that had 250GB SATA II hard drives in them as well as Gigabit NICs. I did two batches of tests one afternoon:

One test batch was done NIC to NIC from her iMac to mine using a 15 foot CAT6 crossover cable. When attached, both NICs reported a 1000Mbit connection.

The second batch was done through a D-Link DI-524 10/100 wireless router using 15 foot CAT6 standard networking cables; her NIC to the router, my NIC to the router. When attached, both NICs reported 100Mbit connections.

I did a 4.3GB file transfer (single ISO file of a backed up DVD5), as well as doing another 4.3GB transfer of strictly mp3 files (about 812 files, average size about 6MB or so). On top of that I did yet one more transfer with a mixture of files ranging from under 4KB text files to 150MB PDF files, roughly 2500 files in all, and about 4.2GB worth.

Then we bought two laptops recently in the past week: she got a Turion64 powered lappy with a 10/100 NIC in it (Broadcom PCI), and I got a brand new Gateway Core 2 Duo powered lappy with a Marvel Yukon 10/100 PCI-E NIC in it. I decided to do the same test, more or less, using the same 3 DVDs I used the first time after I copied their contents to one hard drive to do the test.

My laptop has a 160GB 5400 rpm 2.5" SATA I drive; her's has an 80GB 7200 rpm 2.5" ATA drive. Both drives are fully capable of putting out 20MB/s or higher sustained without issues.

So let the testing begin, sorta...

On the iMacs, regardless of content, the connection using NIC to NIC with the crossover cable got me speeds ranging from 85 to 95MB a second - which was awesome and almost made me run out and get a Gigabit router that day. :)

Using the 10/100 router in between machines, the connection showed consistent speeds in the 10 to 12 MB/s range, about the maximum that a 100 Mbit connect is going to do, from the beginning to the end of the test.

However, on the laptops, that's a different story. Some would argue the router was in the way, but realize that in the laptop to laptop testing I'm about to speak of, it was NIC to NIC using the same CAT6 crossover cable, with no router in between. And the data content being transferred was the same also.

Laptop to laptop the speeds never went over 9.2 MB/s, ever. This was Vista to Vista also, and then I restored XP Pro images to both laptops and gave it another run. Same results: the speed never went over 9.2 MB/s, not once in the testing.

The only thing I didn't do was test the iMacs NIC to NIC with forced 100Mbit operation, but I sold off the iMacs in the past few weeks so now I'll never know I suppose.

I haven't noticed anything different with Vista and the hardware I'm presently using in terms of network transfers. I use files on my Wife's laptop; she uses files on mine, but in the end I still say Windows is behind in terms of network performance.

Again, my testing was ad hoc and done off the cuff, but for me they're pretty substantial: Windows just doesn't do networking as well as OSX or Linux distros seem to be capable of. While a megabyte or two per second might not seem like such a big deal, over the course of a lot of big transfers, it adds up.

Just my $.02...
 
Excavator said:
DXdiag.jpg
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<Paris>That's hot.</Paris>Have you run the 32bit version of Vista at all to give us an idea of how the two versions compare or has been x64 all the way for you?
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Again, my testing was ad hoc and done off the cuff, but for me they're pretty substantial: Windows just doesn't do networking as well as OSX or Linux distros seem to be capable of. While a megabyte or two per second might not seem like such a big deal, over the course of a lot of big transfers, it adds up.

Just my $.02...
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That doesn't surprise me at all. Make a note of those results and try to remember to post results using the same testing scenario if it's possible when the service pack is released for Vista. We will be getting a new kernel and a whole bunch of other improvements.

There is also a possiblity that the NICs in the laptops just aren't that great. Apple isn't all that likely to use cheap components in their computers.

Thanks for the info.
 
The Gigabit NICs in the iMacs are pretty standard Broadcom PCI-E stuff these days.

Windows is just slower in networking, period. :p It always has been, it always will be. But in day to day operation on the Desktop, it smokes all the others - but again, that's my experience.

YMMV
 
The internet is optimized for high-speed connections, so dial-up shouldn't even be a consideration these days.
 
General Crespin said:
Many of us rural folk don't have the choice.
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I understand that....because I work for a dairy company, and many people work from home on their farms in rural areas. Satellite is usually an option for these people as well, which is better than dial-up.
 
djnes said:
I understand that....because I work for a dairy company, and many people work from home on their farms in rural areas. Satellite is usually an option for these people as well, which is better than dial-up.
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Not exactly, some satellite connections still use dial up for transmit in the connection, and the latency involved kind of sucks.
 
The latency only matters if you're into games. Years ago I lived in Death Valley, CA, working at a hotel resort there in the middle of the desert - seriously. The only option for Internet connectivity when I got there in 1997 was dialup, and it was straight long distance for each call. My regular phone bill ran anywhere from $350 to $600 a month. I know people that spend that much on cigarettes that are/were killing them and they'd spend time laughing or calling me an idiot for such phone bills.

Anyway, after a few years someone in a nearby town (Pahrump, NV) decided to bring out some local Internet dialup service to us. No one had done it before because of the considerable monetary outlay required to set up an entirely new prefix that PacBell said would be required. So he fronted over $70K to set it up, got it up and running, and less than 2 days after PacBell went live with the new prefix created specifically for local Internet access in Death Valley, Earthlink found out about it and dropped a POP in the same prefix, only two digits away.

So, the local guy from Pahrump fronted the prefix setup fees, and Earthlink swooped in and stole all the business pretty quick by undercutting him by 50% and he basically lost every penny he put into the project. My involvement was setting up the T1 lines on the hotel property in some office space he was leasing and although he offered me free access, I paid for it because I believed in the project and wanted it to succeed.

So much for small business anymore...

Anyway, after a year of Earthlink I got DirecPC and had a blast with it - that is, until Hughes started implementing the dreaded FAP (and no I don't mean the slang term for... well... Google it dammit) - Fair Access Policy. Hughes never put that into anything that anyone outside of Hughes could ever begin to comprehend.

It was and still is some arbitrary limitation on how much data you can download in a given amount of time - it's not related to your download speed specifically (I regularly got bursts of up to 15 Mbps - yes, 15 megabits per second off satellite) so that didn't trigger it. What did seem to trigger it and what still does seem to trigger it is how much you grab in a period of time

The issue is: Hughes never tells anyone how much or in what period of time. Talk about halfassed management. "You get unlimited downloads, just don't actually try to take us up on that offer."

Once you get FAP'ed (not the slang term again, I assure you) you're throttled back to sub-28.8 dialup speeds, like 2KB/s if you're lucky. It lasts for - get this - another period of time they won't specifically tell anyone, and until that period is over, the connection is effectively useless for anything, even web surfing with the images and Flash crap turned off.

I know I'm off-topic quite a bit, just wanted to share a bit of my DirecPC experience.

And I did play a few games on occasion, actually. Quake, mostly, with some Quake II thrown in once in a while. Quake, more specifically QuakeWorld, with it's dialup-optimized predictive Net code, was actually playable and I regularly had pings in the 250-500 range. Wasn't easy but it was possible.

The latency for every day operation - meaning web surfing and email, etc - isn't even worth considering as a reason for not using satellite Internet service if all you have access to is dialup.

If satellite service is available where you are, and you're stuck on dialup with no hope of cable modem or DSL service in your future, either Hughes DirecPC/DirecWay or Starband satellite service can open a whole new world to you.

As far as I know to this day, DirecPC (satellite downlink, dialup uplink) and DirecWay (2 way satellite, no dialup necessary) are still using that stupid FAP thing. Starband, from what I've read and heard reports about, doesn't limit users in such arbitrary and non-published ways.

</off-topic> :)
 
i dunno, right now i find lan gigabit transfer speeds to be a lot slower compared to my xp machines (45MB/s to only 11MB/s).. Maybe it's immature drivers, but i'm worried :p
 
At least you are getting transfers. On my gig lan network data tranfers with one Vista RC2 install I get never-ending "calculating transfer time" or some such and the other RC2 just dies at a random point and loses all network connectivity. I was thinking it might be a 4226 error but at this point I don't think so. I was thinking of getting an Ultimate and a Home Premium for a day one conversion but now, not so much.
 
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