Faster File Copying

One of the most annoying aspects about Vista is its very slow file copying from one computer to another. This issue has been hashed over and re-hashed many many times on the Internet and it was hoped that SP1 for Vista would finally solve this problem. Unfortunately, people who have already updated to SP1 have found that there is only a small incremental improvement in SP1 over pre-SP1 machines. I found what appears to be the solution on the Internet written in a blog by Mark Minassi. According to Mark, to problem seems to be with the autotuning feature of the new TCP stack and that even relatively new switches and routers may not like the autotuning feature. Try the following to see if transfer times improve: (reboot after resetting before trying out). In an “elevated” command window (must start “As Administrator”) type the following:

C:\> netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Prior to performing the above command, I tried a transfer of a 250 MB file from my computer to our server. The time to do the transfer was 2 min 39 seconds. After applying the above command, the transfer time dropped to 0 min 35 sec. Quite an improvement. Just to prove the point, I reentered the above command with “autotuninglevel=normal” and tried it again. My transfer time went back up to the 2 min 39 second time. So, it appears as if the above fix will work, at least for me. Try it and see if it works for you also.

Source : Vista Tips and Techniques by Greg Schwartz