- Help! We're Starving for Bandwidth!
- Tweak #1: Get Control of Your Internet Resources
- Tweak #2: Run Your Proxy Server in an Array
- Tweak #3: Terminate VPNs in Hardware
- Tweak #4: Optimized Windows Means a Faster Internet Experience
- Tweak #5: Windows: Stay Out and Strip
Anyone who has ever moved an old modem to a faster computer and seen web pages download faster knows that it's not all about bandwidth or the hardware it travels directly over. The entire framework for retrieving, receiving, storing, displaying, and refreshing data makes the Internet experience faster or slower than the bare rate of data coming down the pike. To that end, Dexter Dionisio suggests something that's healthy whether you want to speed up your Net connection or just Windows computing: "Stop unnecessary services. Go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, click the Services icon, and disable Messenger (for example). You probably should disable Print Spooler as well, depending on the function of the server," he says. Dionisio also suggests diving into Control Panel under Network Connections, Local Area Connection, Properties, and removing any unnecessary clients, services, and/or protocols.