Windows Vista vs. hotels

At many TechEds this year I've presented information about the new TCP/IP stack in Windows Vista. One of the important advances is its automatic performance tuning. With some of the early pre-release builds of Windows Vista, people were reporting problems with public Internet connections, most notably in hotels. Some of the routers used in hotels don't properly implement the specifications for receive window tuning; the symptom looks like failed DNS requests when trying to browse the Web.

We made some changes to the stack and to Internet Explorer to detect non-conforming gateways and adjust accordingly. And indeed, I've seen the problem pretty much disappear. However, the gateway in a hotel I visited in South Africa still exhibited the problem, and when I disabled the auto-tuning Windows could finally connect.

I suspect that most of you won't encounter this using the RTM build. If, however, on rare occasion you do, here is the command you can issue to disable automatic tuning:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

You can abbreviate netsh commands to the first three letters like this:

netsh int tcp set glo aut=dis

Be sure to re-enable the setting when you aren't on the hotel's network:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Or, using the shortened method:

netsh int tcp set glo aut=nor

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Today at my TechNet event in Jacksonville, FL I had an attendee tell me about an issue one of his customers

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  It's hard to like Vista. Or rather, it's hard to be someone that likes Vista. On the other hand

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  It's hard to like Vista. Or rather, it's hard to be someone that likes Vista. On the other hand

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  It seems like when I reload Vista (in this case rebuilding for a hard drive failure) I have to dig out

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  There are times that I have unusual ways of retrieving information... and this is one of those unusual

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Windows Vista vs. Hotels

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I found this tidbit on Steve Riley’s blog. Windows Vista vs. hotels At many TechEds this year I've

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  There are times that I have unusual ways of retrieving information... and this is one of those unusual

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I'm on the road this week visiting New Jersey and staying at a hotel which has free wireless Internet

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2006
  It is great when you share your extensive knowledge on how to solve potential software problems, based on personal experiences with software that you know very well (or have the necessary good contacts for solving problems on). Who has ever experienced faultless software from any vendor (regardless of size or importance)?   I do not think our company will ever implement Vista, but I know I would be very annoyed by this kind of performance problems.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  Thanks - on a client site we have access to a dedicated broadband connection. On that connection MSN Messenger was failing to connect; it was fine from everywhere else. Disabling the auto-tuning resolved the issue and Messenger connects fine. The router is a Netgear DG834 ADSL router just in case anyone else has an issue.

• Anonymous
  November 28, 2006
  Thanks for that.  I never ran into the problem with pre-RTM builds of Vista, on the RTM itself.  Regardless, this is a very useful tip.  Much obliged.

• Anonymous
  December 10, 2008
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