I recently installed Vista on my main rig (long story short: old rig died, bought new rig). Everything was installing peachy, it might even be considered “fast”. No SATA drivers were needed, no other drivers were needed either. I’m still using on board video, but there’s a spot for a x16 PCI Express card.

Well anyway, installed the Vista, did all the Vista updates and installed all my 2007 software. Everything was moving along at a quick pace until I tried to load up Office over the network. Even navigating to the shared directory “Microsoft” was painfully slow. I attempted to copy the ISO over. I say Attempted because I didn’t even let it finish. It was moving at a snail’s pace: 16KB/sec. I can freakin DOWNLOAD it faster than I can grab it off a network share! WTF mate!

So I figured it was a problem with the network settings. I changed them from autonegotiate to Full Duplex. Then to Half Duplex. I even got rid of the IPv6 and VLAN settings, which did absolutely nothing. I finally hooked the system up to my Ghost Server and attempted to copy over a 3GB Ghost image. It flew by at around 21MB/sec. Twenty-one Mega Bytes versus sixteen kilobytes. Thank you network.

I narrowed it down to a couple possibilities – the Ghost Server was on it’s own unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch. The Applications server is on a managed Cisco switch with several VLANs. It only ran/runs slow on the managed network.

Here’s the fix now that I made you read all of my ramblings:
Somehow get to the administrative CMD. I edited quite a few settings on Vista already to allow me to administer the computer without that annoying popup. It used to be Start >> Run >> CMD. It’s still that in my edited version.
Then type “netsh interface tcp show global”. This will show the current netsh configuration in case you break something later.
Type “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=high”. This will set it to a high rate of speed instead of the normal rate. Other configurations include “low” and “disabled”. I’ve heard some have had luck with disabling the autotuning completely. Be sure to repair your network connection. Oh wait, you can’t by normal means (thank you Vista again!).
In the command prompt, type “ipconfig /release” and then “ipconfig /renew”.