Egil Hansen

I have been baffled by this every since switching to Vista last month. Sometimes I would only be able to get around 5 MB/sec transfer rates from my local server, while at other times it would max out around 10-12 MB/sec, which is as expected on a 100 Mbit network.

It turns out to be due to a bug in the new Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMSCC) included in Vista, that will help prioritize processing and network resources during media playback. As Mark Russinovich explains in his blog, the MMSCC will give media applications higher priority during playback, while at the same time throttle down network activity to ensure that streaming audio and video get through without glitches.

The problem seems to come from the hardcoded limit that is forced upon the network card, which would give a computer with a single network card a maximum throughput of about 15 MB/sec., which in itself is not that bad. The problem surfaces when you have more than one network card (like most laptops), then a bug in the MMSCC will throttle the network connections even more.

If you, like me, have multiple virtual network adapters from installing VMWare and various VPN software packages, you will have degradation out of proportions of what the MMSCC team intended for. Luckily, Microsoft has the networking and MMCSS team working on a fix for this. Meanwhile, remember to kill your online radio whenever you want to transfer data over the network at a reasonable speed.

I just recently installed Vista on my work PC, and have since been looking for different ways to get more out of Vista. Here is a (continually updated) list of my favourite Vista tricks and tweaks. Usability tricks and tweaks:

• Wictor describes how you can customize the Favourite Links in Windows Vista common dialogs, which is a lot simpler then completing the same feat in Windows XP.
• Symbolic Links has finally made its way into the Windows family. Microsoft describes a “symbolic link is a file-system object that points to another file system object”, which can be sort of abstract to say the least. What it basically means is that you can go into C:\Users\Egil\Current Project\ and it will be the same as going in to C:\Users\Egil\Document\Customer\2007\Project Name\. In other words, C:\Users\Egil\Current Project\ is a symbolic link to C:\Users\Egil\Document\Customer\2007\Project Name\, it is just a shorter path which safes me mouse clicks. Think of it as an advanced way of creating shortcuts to things. The official documentation for symbolic links can be found on MSDN. If my explanation just confused you, give Wikipedia’s a try.

Performance tricks and tweaks:

• On TweakVista there is a short guide in getting a bit more speed out of your SATA disks. Microsoft recommends only using this option if your disks have a backup power supply, like a battery in a laptop, otherwise you might lose data.
• Ever wondered why Vista suddenly starts hugging the hard disk around 01:00 on Wednesdays? Well the answer could be the scheduled defragging included in Vista (at least Business and Ultimate). If you are comfortable in handling your own defragging, go in to Task Scheduler and disable that “service”.
• Out of the box Vista has a lot of enabled services, which can be safely disabled, especially if you are not a corporate laptop user. The very geeky but always reliable Black Viper has always been the place to turn to, for a service guide for your favourite Windows edition.

Visual tricks and tweaks:

• Vista comes with a rather big border size by default, more precisely a total of 4 pixels is wasted on every side of windows, dialog boxes… well everything that is boxed in Vista. Luckely, this is easily customized. I personally just set the border size to 0.