Increase your internet speed: Really useful Windows XP and Firefox bandwidth-increasing tips

Increase your internet speed (bandwidth) by 20%

Prefer video directions instead? Scroll down…

Windows holds back a large portion of your internet bandwidth as part of it's network settings. But if you're not on a corporate network, if this is your home computer, free that up for greater bandwidth. Get that extra speed by making a very quick, simple and easy change in the Windows Group Policy editor (works just like looking through your files and folders) as follows:

1. Click START, then click RUN.
2. Type "gpedit.msc" without the quotes, then click OK.
3. Browse to the highlighted area shown above -- the folder you want is Computer Configuration/ Administrative Templates/ Network/ QoS Packet Scheduler in the left-hand pane (shown above) then double-click "Limit reservable bandwith" in the right-hand pane. The dialog box shown below will pop up.
   
4. Click the dot (radio button) for Enabled as shown below, and in Bandwidth Limit, type or click up or down until a number between 0 and 10 is shown.
5. Click Apply, and click your way out of the open dialog boxes: you're done!

The lower the number you enter in Bandwidth Limit (where I have entered a "1" in the image below), the faster your internet connection will be. However, "5" is probably low enough, though you can play with this number:

However, realize if the if the network card has a specific limit set on it in registry, this would have no impact on it.

Here is a video with directions and an example of speed increasing:




Increase Bandwith by 20%

Speed up Firefox

If you have a high-speed (Cable, DSL, etc.) connection this change will give you a very noticeable speed increase for larger web pages. Inside the address bar on Firefox (where web page addresses/URLs go) type this and press enter:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to "true". This adjusts the pipelining settings. For more cool settings available in about: config, go here.)

Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, as suggested by http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (though you can play with this number).

Finally, right-click anywhere (on any setting) and a menu will pop out: select 'new' and then 'integer'. Copy this (without the quotes): "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and paste it in as the name, and then set the value to "0" (zero). This removes the render delay. You should experience a BIG speed increase!

More speed tips

• More Firefox connection speed tips site 1 (see also: site 2)
  
• To speedup XP in general, try these tips.