Speed Up 802.11n Connection for Windows XP

Mario Morejon

Network Management - When you think about improving the performance of wireless networks, the first problem with 5-GHz 802.11n wireless routers will almost certainly appear in your mind. The 'n' innovation also allows wireless devices to use multiple antennas and multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) technology, still referred to as spatial multiplexing. With spatial multiplexing, operating systems must combine higher volumes of TCP data streams at constant round-trip intervals between the router or access point and laptop. Although your network connection and network bandwidth will limit download speeds, with 802.11n networks, we can adjust to increase the speed of the network.

Because of the larger 802.11n throughput, more and more bits are transferred between your wireless notebook and the router, but that means that a legacy operating system like Windows XP takes more time to assemble. and data processing. In this operating system there is an option called Receive Window Scaling, which can optimize the performance of Windows XP, but it is disabled by default in the Registry.

To adjust for this option to work, the laptop's wireless network adapter must use an 'n' or an 'n' PC card inside. You only need to add a few items in the Registry:

1. Open Windows XP Registry (Click Start then Run, type regedit and press Enter)

2. Back up current Registry ( File | Export .)

3. Find the values in the HKey_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesTcpip path The parameters and add a DWORD entry named Tcp1323Opts. Then right-click this entry and select New | DWORD value . Give it a value of 3.

Add a DWORD entry named TcpWindowSize and give it a hexa value of 40000.

You must restart the system for the changes to take effect. Your adjustments will make the operating system turn on the Windows Scaling option. Windows Scaling will improve the data flow round-trip time in the TCP stack, so your laptop will increase speed with 802.11n routers in 5-GHz mode. Although there is not a dialog box that you can call to inform you about how much throughput has been improved, you will see a real difference in later downloads.