Last Touched on 02/24/02 04:36:02 PM
Last Touched on 02/24/02 04:36:02 PM
| February 24, 2002 |
| August 14, 2001 |
For those who are interested in such things, Microsoft has a DSL Architecture Hardware White Paper with a detailed (yet easy-to-understand) write-up of the fundamentals of a DSL connection from the end-user through the phone company up to the service provider. The protocol stack diagram and explanation (pictured below) alone is worth its weight in gold to those who are trying to troubleshoot a DSL connection problem. Why? Because unless you know the source of a connection issue, any and all troubleshooting should be done layer by layer--whether the connection is DSL, ISDN, modem, Ethernet or other. Having a protocol layer diagram to guide you in such can be extremely helpful. Just remember some of the topics discussed in Microsoft's DSL white paper may have changed since the white paper was written in April of 1999 and you should refer to the appropriate RFCs for confirmation; however, the majority of the white paper is still valid for the majority of DSL connections.
Back in my January 6th, 2001 update, I mentioned disabling UDP as an available transport in Windows Media Player as a work-around when behind a NAT and/or Proxy device to alleviate the cumulative affect on a audio/video stream when UDP fragments are discarded (which--normally--is a good thing) by (certain) NAT and Proxy devices. Well it seems Microsoft discovered a similar issue a few months later (June 2001) in the TCP/IP stack of Windows 98 Second Edition when Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) is enabled. The details of the issue can be found in Knowledge Base Article Q275530, which notes that a viable work-around is to disable UDP as an available transport. The article also notes that the issue was resolved in the TCP/IP stack included with Windows Mellennium. So again I recommend installing Dial-Up Networking (DUN) version 1.4 to upgrade your TCP/IP stack to the same version included with Windows Millennium to ensure that known deficiencies have been resolved and are no longer present on your system.
I've fallen behind and several updates have been released since the last time I updated the updates page. I'll add them shortly, including the Post Service Pack 6a Security Roll Up for Windows NT4.
| May 27, 2001 |
By the way, if you've ever wondered how the TCP/IP stacks between the different versions of Windows compare to each other, you may be interested in reading the 'Feature Comparison Table for Microsoft TCP/IP Versions' section of Microsoft's Windows 2000 TCP/IP Implementation Details. It compares Windows 95 (with and without Winsock 2), Windows 98, 98 SE, NT4 (SP5) and 2000.
Ryan Stotts sends words of the Internet Explorer 6 Preview and Windows 2000 Service Pack 2. I've updated the updates page to include the Service Pack 2 for Windows 2000. However, I'll wait until Internet Explorer 6 is finalized before I add it. (If you're interested in previewing it, it is--and has been--available to the public from for some time directly from Microsoft's Windows Update site.)
| March 7, 2001 |
| January 6, 2001 |
| January 6, 2001 |
For those of you who visit the updates page here at Optimizing.net, you may have noticed that I added Internet Explorer 5.5 SP1 to all the Windows sections except the Windows 2000 section. I changed my mind about IE 5.5 after IE 5.5 SP1 was released simply because SP1 fixes the security holes that I had complained about last August. However, I still cannot recommend IE 5.5 SP1 for Windows 2000 after having loaded IE 5.5 on several Windows 2000 machines and experiencing several obvious and significant problems. (From reading various forums and newsgroups, this seems to be a common trend under Windows 2000 for both the original IE 5.5 and IE 5.5 SP1 either it works great or very poorly.)
A few of you may have also noticed I also added Windows Media Player 7 to every section of the updates page (except the Windows NT section) after also having publicly trounced it as bloated crap last August. I actually haven't changed my mind, I still feel it's horribly bloated; however, while I install Windows Media Player 7 for the updated codecs, I actually use Windows Media Player 6.4 to play the files. This is possible because even after you install WMP 7, WMP 6.4 is still there. Do a file search for MPLAYER2 and execute it, once it's loaded select 'Options' under the 'View' menu and then choose 'Select All' from the the 'Formats' tab and hit 'Apply'. Strangely enough, this also works on Windows Millennium--very useful for those Windows ME users with slower machines. Thanks to the microsoft.beta.windows_update.general newsgroup for this great work-around.
Speaking of Windows Media Player, if you are behind a proxy, NAT or other interim connection device and are having difficulties streaming video at a rate your connection is capable of, disabling UDP as an available transport should resolve the problem. Additionally, consider setting the buffer from the default to 7 seconds. Please remember, not all problems are connection problems, sometimes the application itself is the source of the problem. By the way, in QuickTime when under the same connection circumstances, I also disable UDP as an available transport and set the connection speed to the 'Intranet/LAN' option, but the issue is not as apparent in QuickTime as it is in Windows Media Player. If interested in more Internet application optimization techniques like these, let me know and I'll work on getting more up.
In response to a question regarding using a HOSTS file to deny ad sites, I placed an already prepared HOSTS file (originally posted to the microsoft.beta.whistler.internetexplorer newsgroup on 11/12/00) with a great deal of ad sites already listed on to Optimizing.net. However, in my humble opinion, using Internet Explorer's built-in security zones is a more elegant solution, except for the occasional frame domain verification type problem (one of which Microsoft recently released a fix).
(All news items prior to July of 2000 have been deleted from this page.)
| January 6, 2001 |
Which brings us to FIFO under Windows 98. Recently, people have started to recommend decreasing the serial port FIFO buffer to force their computer to handle the serial port interrupts immediately rather than buffering them. While this is a viable optimization technique that puts a servicing priority on the serial port, for all external and internal ISA (but not PCI) modem users, it has the side effect of de-optimizing the computer's other hardware service requests for the 8Mhz Bus that the ISA Bus and serial port reside on. On a fast system, this slow-down is negligible, but for those not on the cutting edge this can cause a loss of responsiveness or performance in other system areas. As such, I cannot recommend this optimization and urge you to use the FIFO as intended.
Please remember, Optimizing.net strives to present the best balance of optimization techniques for all visitors, not just the ones running high-end systems. In a recent e-mail to such a request from a modem user with a high-end computer, I responded that if the goal was to only support high-end users, modem information would not even be included since even the fastest modem is no longer considered "high-end". Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!
| October 23, 2000 |
| September 30, 2000 |
The ME page is online! Thankfully, Windows ME has learned from the mistakes of 95 and 98 and requires much less to get it performing optimally. Added ME section to the updates page. Yes, there are updates for it already! Added MDAC 2.6 to all pertinent update sections. There were updates to some of the other pages since the last time I wrote something here, but nothing that was worth mentioning then or now...
Here's a slightly revised and more patriotic banner I cooked up, comments and suggestions are welcome:
| August 20, 2000 |
| July 30, 2000 |
By the way, in case you haven't already noticed, the LAN page is now based on Windows ME's property sheets and since I now have the final version (Build 3000.2), the dial-up version will be coming making an appearance very shortly. Sorry about the delay getting around to it, but ever since Labtec discontinued all support for my joystick (the SpaceOrb 360°), I'd dedicated most of my time figuring out how to make the Ascii Sphere 360° joystick for the PlayStation work (via a PSX to USB adapter) under Windows 2000. Thankfully, I figured it out. If you are a former SpaceOrb user looking for Orb control under Windows 2000, my setup and configuration method was posted to the news section of Birdman's SpaceOrb Lair.
| July 14, 2000 |
Additionally, "the new data compression Recommendation [v.44] is based on the LZJH compression algorithm developed by US-based Hughes Network Systems and gives an improvement in compression of more than 25% beyond the existing Recommendation V.42bis, and a data compression ratio in the region of 6:1 for a typical Web browsing connection."
That means that the new v.44 compression will match the theoretical compression limit of software (STAC) compression and hopefully end the software versus hardware compression argument once and for all. Besides, the argument is a little silly, since average compression performance for both STAC (6:1 max) and v.42 (4:1 max) averages only about 1.25:1 transferring real-world (mixed) data streams. Believe me, I wish STAC could live up to its 6:1 claim--especially on the multiple ISDN connections I am responsible for since ISDN adapters don't incorporate modem standards...like compression (v.42bis).
© Copyright 1999 - 2002 - Mr. Echevarria