Increasing the speed of your broadband connection can be something of a hit or a miss affair. A number of software applications claim they can take the guess work out of the process.
One such that I’ve been road testing is TweakMASTER. A 30 day evaluation version is available for download, thereafter it is a purchase or a free registration if you sign up for a “free” product from one of their partner companies.
The interface is straightforward and clean, and the tweaking tools are generally helpful as they let the user set the values for two the most important variables in the Windows XP operating system that impact on broadband performance and which can be changed to optimise a broadband connection.
Primarily, the two settings that provide the biggest speed boost are things called the MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) and Receive Window (RWIN). By default, these are set up for Ethernet on a local network.
The MTU controls the maximum size of individual data packets that can be transmitted across a network. Data packets larger than this are chopped up into smaller packages and then reassembled, so this obviously affects speed and performance. A low MTU value means everything you do being that much slower, including your broadband connection. Received wisdom is that the MTU be set optimally to 1458.
The RWIN setting, ironically, if set too high can have an adverse effect. The RWIN determines how much data your computer can take on board in one go. If information were snail mail packages, the RWIN would be telling the postman, “Don’t dump the contents of your mail bag in one go, give me a maximum of five letters at a time.” Tweaking the RWIN sets a value that can be continuously handled with ease.
With TweakMASTER resetting these values is a mere matter of selecting a new value from drop down menus within the Advanced Optimization Settings tabs.
The application also has a Connection Optimization Wizard that takes you through the process step by step. While easy to use, the wizard does miss an important trick in evaluation. At the end of the wizard, there are five optimisation strategies to choose from, each of which you are urged to try out over a couple of days and test to establish which strategy obtains the best speed.
Unfortunately, unless you take a careful note of which strategy you choose and on which days it ran, there’s no accurate way of telling. For when you re-open the wizard, the strategy selection page opens with strategy one pre-selected by default and even the test results don’t spell out which strategy they were testing. This is a serious shortcoming the makers need to address. You could try using System Restore to go back to a creation point to a time immediately after your fastest speed time, but even this isn’t fool proof.
To be honest, with another 25 days of the test left to go, I’m seriously thinking about uninstalling and trying another application, ActiveSpeed instead. But I may press on a bit longer with TweakMASTER to re-find that 30 per cent speed increase I’ve lost; knowing when to stop tinkering is the difficult bit.
Shame we couldn’t just get the highest speed possible straight out of the box in the first place…
