How To Take Back 20% Of Your Bandwidth From Windows XP

Hi guys,

I tried this as suggested and it doesn’t work. A screen comes up and says it can’t find it; “gpedit.msc” what gives ??

Hope you can help.

Thanks, Fred

I ran mine from the dos window and it worked fine for me.

Make sure that you have admin rights to the machine.

Is it possible that this is a XP Pro only thing? I’ll have to find a XP Home machine to try it on.

[...] All your Bandwidth are Belong to Microsoft! Yup, you read it right. Take a look: http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/new…om-windows-xp/ [...]

Windows Tip – Does XP Steal Your Bandwidth?
written by Morgan Webb on Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Windows XP got a bad rap. Morgan comes to its defense.
Our Windows Tip today is an Anti-Windows Tip. I love getting emails from our viewers telling me their favorite new tips, tweaks, and hacks, and I must say the following tip had me intrigued. There is a claim, reported on The Register, that Windows XP steals 20 percent of available bandwidth for its own devices. This is not a sinister move toward world takeover on Microsoft’s part. The 20 percent bandwidth reservation is blamed on an unnecessary implementation of QoS (Quality of Service) on the XP professional machine.

Some packets are more important than others

QoS assigns numeric priority values to each packet traveling over a network. Packets from mission critical network applications are given a higher priority than the general applications, which are given a higher priority than Bob from HR downloading the latest video’s from the Net.

QoS then factors in the size of the packet and the load on the network (if the network is congested) to determine which packet should be sent first. The part of QoS that the XP tweakers are worried about is how QoS allocates and reserves bandwidth for certain critical streams (called RSVP, or Resource ReSerVation Protocol). Their assertion is that QoS, by default, reserves 20 percent of the XP system’s bandwidth in case it needs it for a mission critical application.

The truth is that your XP machine needs to be running on a QoS-enabled network and run QoS-enabled applications for it to reserve any available bandwidth. Further, mission critical applications do not reserve portions of bandwidth “in case” they need them, they only reserve a portion prior to transmission and release it afterward.

Testing QoS out

I have tested this and tried to see a difference in my bandwidth allocations. You can use your performance monitor (type “perfmon” into your run menu) and add counters for bandwidth, bytes received, and bytes sent. I pulled down large files before and after the tweak, tried single and multiple FTPs.

I monitored generic http transmissions and ran multiple applications that accessed the Internet. Nothing. I could not create a situation where the tweak made any discernable difference, let alone a difference of 20 percent, either on the corporate network or on my home computer. If you feel you need to make this tweak just in case (as it doesn’t really do any harm to your machine), or if you want to test it out for yourself and see what it’s all about, you can get the instructions at Tweak XP.

THE LG ARTICLE IS SIMPLY INCORRECT – READ THIS FROM MICROSOFT:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316666

Microsoft says:
Correction of some incorrect claims about Windows XP QoS support
There have been claims in various published technical articles and newsgroup postings that Windows XP always reserves 20 percent of the available bandwidth for QoS. These claims are incorrect. The information in the “Clarification about QoS in end computers that are Running Windows XP” section correctly describes the behavior of Windows XP systems.

Uhm Ray…

“Determines the percentage of connection bandwidth that the system can reserve. This value limits the combined bandwidth reservations of all programs running on the system.

By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default.

If you enable this setting, you can use the “Bandwidth limit” box to adjust the amount of bandwidth the system can reserve.

If you disable this setting or do not configure it, the system uses the default value of 20 percent of the connection.

Important: If a bandwidth limit is set for a particular network adapter in the registry, this setting is ignored when configuring that network adapter.”

From Windows XP Pro QoS setting as described above.

I notice a definite improvement over LAN (100 mbit). On WAN not, and I’m quite eager to learn how this influences 802.11g (54 mbit).

Is there a way to preform this task on Windows XP Home?

doesnt work for home only pro

You are aware that this is somewhat a Myth. Windows doesn’t actually reserve 20% of your bandwidth all the time, it priorities 20% to programs that request high priority access to your network connection. This is part of QoS.

100% of your connection is always available, however if a high priority program requests bandwidth Windows will force at least 20% for that programs use.

Hey..

I did this and I have had a bad experience. First I used to get 512KB/S download but now after I did what you told I’m Only getting 460KB/S.

Any Tips?

No problems with my PC after this tweak.

Tweak your frigging life instead of windows. Nubs.

after done goto run then type gpupdate then press enter to update forcely…