Tweaking Software: Maximizing speed of broadband and dial-up

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TCP/IP Tweaking
Tweaking Software
Test Internet Speed

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Recommended programs:

webROCKET
is a powerful, easy-to-use program for Windows® 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP   which boosts your Internet connection speed by up to 200%.

ActiveSpeed
Unlike other Internet boosters, ActiveSpeed actually learns while you surf, boosting your connection faster and faster over time.

Dr. Speed
Dr. Speed will automatically super charge the Internet connection you already have by optimizing and boosting Internet data transport efficiency. Dr. Speed works with your modem or high-speed connection to bring your surfing speeds and computer efficiency to their maximum potential.

TweakMASTER
TweakMASTER can substantially improve your download speeds for all types of connections from dialup to DSL, Cable, and Wireless. Even AOL users will be amazed at how much more responsive their system will be!

Turbo Surfer
automatically optimizes your internet connection boosting your internet speed by up to 220%. Works with ALL connections - America Online, Cable Modem, ALL phone modems, even DSL.

Tweaking Software

To get an idea of what kind of software is out there for connection tweaking, I waded through literally dozens of programs. Most of them were not worth listing here, simply because they were too rudimentary-- many of them are nothing more than a form interface through which you can set the MTU and Receive Window parameters. (I've cited one example of such a program.) Most of them didn't contain any mechanism for before-and-after testing to determine if the changes made were positive or negative. One was nothing more than a .REG file with an installer app!

There's no question I got some improvement in my connections. With a tweak in place for Receive Window Size, I was able to kick my maximum download speed up to 515Kbits/sec from around 430 on my laptop. How much effort it took to get that improvement was another question: with a program like TweakMASTER, it was relatively simple, but with a program like CableNut, it was much more difficult. Note that I tested all Windows versions except where otherwise indicated.

CableNut 4.08
CableNut will probably appeal to the experts who already know their TCP/IP settings, among other communications settings. It is representative of the great majority of programs I looked at -- it simply provides a great many of the tweakable TCP options in a set of text boxes with little or no explanation. If you know what the terminology is, you can tweak to your heart's content, but if not, you're going to have to do some research on your own.

CableNut performs no testing of its own, either. Any changes you make, you have to confirm independently. It does, however, come with preconfigured settings for cable, DSL, and dial-up, and for both Win9x and Win2K. It does not, however, seem to work with XP.

TweakMASTER
Of the programs I looked at in this batch, TweakMASTER was easily the best of them all. It doesn't support the immense breadth of functions that CableNut did, but it explains them all, and provides a great many other features in the same package. And it supports Windows XP properly, on both dial-ups and broadband.

TweakMASTER's Optimization Wizard attempts to get the best settings for your connection after you select your connection type. If you have more than one network interface or modem in your machine, you can manually choose a desired connection for TweakMASTER to optimize. Three automatic optimization strategies are offered, but one of the big problems is they're not explained in detail -- all you get is a statement to the effect that "one size does NOT fit all!" and that you may want to try each and test each before settling on one. This is a sizeable flaw in an otherwise excellent program.

Once you've got things set up, you can probe various servers to determine the best MTU value (in my case with my Ethernet network and broadband connection it was 1500). Other TCP options tweakable by TweakMASTER include toggling RFC 1323 window scaling and timestamping (two features that can improve performance on servers that support them), HTTP connections, and black hole detection.

The single other biggest feature in TweakMASTER is a smart DNS cache that "harvests" DNS entries to cache while you browse in IE. You can also feed it a list of bookmarks or favorites from IE or Netscape, from which to derive DNS entries. The HOSTS file on your system is then updated by TweakMASTER automatically.

ModemBooster 2.6
This program only works for dial-up connections -- there's nothing here for cablemodem users. On the other hand, it's dedicated to its job: when you launch it, a wizard-driven interface asks you for which one of many popular ISPs you are using, and tweaks accordingly. It also has the usual manual configuration for MTU, RWIN and TTL values, but that's about it.

Webroot Accelerate 2K2
Sporting a shiny-looking interface, Webroot Accelerate 2K2 runs for 30 days in trial-version mode. When you install the app, you can either have the program tweak your connection automatically or play with the settings yourself. Settings include the MTU, TTL, Black Hole Detect, Keep-Alive, and of course the Receive Window size. Unfortunately, it does no testing and it does not appear to be XP compatible, which makes it only slightly more useful than a program like CableNut.

Internet Rocket 4.65
Like TweakMASTER, Internet Rocket also as a DNS caching system, but its DNS cache feature does not automatically detect new domain names-- you have to insert them manually, which makes it that much less convenient to use. The changes to the DNS cache are written directly to the HOSTS file, same as with TweakMASTER.

As far as tweaks go, Internet Rocket covers all the stuff I'd come to expect: MTU, Receive Window, TTL, Black Hole Detect, and so on. There's no editing the Max Connections entries, though, but the program does log all its changes, so you can go back in the event something causes damage.

The most annoying thing about this program was its license: it's "Homepageware," which means that as long as you run the program, you have to set your browser's homepage to one of four sites they list.

BeFaster
A 15-day trialware program with a robot voice (no, seriously), BeFaster was also offered for BeOS, but that version appears to no longer be under development. It edits the standard stuff: MTU, Receive Windows, per-server connections, max sockets, keep-alive, TTL, and black hole, but it has no DNS cache. It does let you ping a target server -- but only for keep-alive, not for discovering MTU or making any analysis. It also comes with presets for dial-up, cable, PPPoE cable/DSL (i.e., slow latency), and DirectPC. Most interestingly, the program has both English and Turkish Help, implying its country of origin.