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Operating systems

Vista network changes for older devices

Recently I installed Vista x64 and had some hassles with some older gear caused by changes to the default behaviour of the TCP stack. An HP Colour LaserJet 4550N would occasionally print a page of junk, I had a few problems with a Cisco 827 ADSL router corrupting some packets and also had file corruption problems using wireless networking to an XP Toshiba laptop running over a WLAN.

The following were the things I did to turn off the new features which solved my problems. I started by turning off SMB2 by inserting the following registry entry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters]
“SMB2″=dword:00000000

Under device manager I disabled the following features for my network adapter:

IPv4 checksum offload
TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4)
UDP Checksum Offload (IPv4)

From an elevated command prompt ran the following to turn off TCP auto-tuning features:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled

Then I typed ‘OptionalFeatures’ in the Windows start search box and turned off ‘Remote Differential Compression’