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Vista Tip: Fix Slow Web Browsing

If you are running a Vista ‘powered’ machine, you may notice your web browser’s page loading suddenly becoming veeery slooow.

This annoyance is browser agnostic — it affects Firefox, Chrome and IE equally.

There are many potential causes, but the main one seems to be the result of something called tcp autotuning, which is another Windows attempt to ‘enhance your browsing experience’

To find out if this is making your web surfing slower than a snoozing snail, you can try turning off or disabling autotuning.

Here’s how:

In the search window of your menu, type the word, ‘cmd’

Windows 7 menu -- Vista is similar

Now hold down the control key and the shift key, and press the enter key.

The ‘User Access Control’ warning pop up will alert you about making system changes.

User Access Control warning pop up

Click Yes

The windows command prompt box will appear

Windows Command Prompt -- Administrator level

Type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Command entered

Press the enter key

Now you may dismiss the command prompt

You should restart windows to make sure the change takes effect.

Try browsing, and see if there’s any speed improvement..

If you experience problems, simply repeat the procedure, but at the end of the command type, ‘enabled’, to re-activate tcp autotuning.

A future post will explain in more detail, and offer advanced tips for additional Vista networking tweaks

pnetsh int tcp se

Pret global autotuninglevel=disablednetsnetsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabledh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Open Office Tune-up

Some of the default memory settings for Open Office production suite are conservative, because it is designed to run on very modest machines.

If you have a fairly new computer, built in the last 5 years or so, with more than 512mb RAM and a good graphics card, here are some tips to make Open Office run noticeably quicker:

Launch the Open Office Org general control panel, or any Open Office application, select the ‘Options’ menu item.

Expand the ‘Open Office Org’ header, and select ‘Memory’

Set the number of Undo steps to something reasonable, such as 30.

Set the graphics cache to a value you’re sure your graphics subsystem can handle, such as 128

Adjust the memory per object value to 20, and

Set Cache for inserted objects to 10.

The ‘remove from memory’ value is entirely up to you.  I have mine set to 10 minutes.

Some users report even faster response if Java is deactivated.

If you’d like to try this tweak, click on the ‘Java’ item in the left-hand window, and de-select ‘Use a java runtime environment

Click ‘Ok’ to save your settings and dismiss the window.

What’s this about?

Computing technology has advanced in the last 10 years far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

No matter if you use a Windows PC, a Mac, or a Linux based computer, all are basically similar, and any can develop problems

This site is devoted to helping you solve them