Super-charged Internet

Super-chargedInternet

It just takes a few clicks to boost the speed of your Internet connection. Here's how you can do it in six simple steps.

Speak of tips for boosting speed, and the first thing that comes to mind is revving up the processor or graphics card. In this hands-on session we aren’t getting into anything geeky or related to hardware, but something that you will try right away. How about boosting the speed of your Internet connection and getting faster download speeds? Simple! Upgrade your plan or change your service provider. Just kidding! Jokes apart, the Internet speed does depend on your plan, but you can get a speed bump by optimizing the TCP/IP settings in the Windows Registry. Yes, we said we aren’t getting into anything geeky, and tinkering with the Registry settings is one daunting task. A mistyped entry or one in the wrong section can lead to your PC behaving abnormally or not booting the next time. Therefore, we will use a free utility called SG TCP Optimizer, which does everything for you including tweaking the Registry settings. You can download this nifty application from www.speedguide.net. It won’t take more than five minutes since it’s only 600 kB in size.

There are many parameters such the TCP window size, MTU, MSS, TTL, and 20 odd others that need to be tuned depending on the speed of your Internet connection. We don’t want to get into the specifics of the parameters because we want to keep this session sweet and simple. By default, the values of some of these parameters are not set in the Windows Registry.

SG TCP Optimizer doesn’t need to be installed and runs directly, making it possible to be used as a portable application than can run off a USB flash drive. It offers two modes for optimizing the TCP/IP settings—If you find MTU, MSS and TTL Greek and Latin, you can use the optimal settings suggested by SG TCP Optimizer. And if you’re an adventurous TCP/IP guru, you can set the parameters manually or even tinker with the TCP/IP related settings in the built-in registry editor. The software has built-in tools for finding out the largest MTU and latency, and advanced settings for Internet Explorer and Quality of Service (QoS). We will stick to the first method because it’s easy, safe and yields good results in most cases. So here’s how you can boost your Internet speed in six simple steps.

Before you proceed, make sure you stop all the applications that hog network bandwidth such as your web browser, instant messenger, P2P client, and so on.