Originally Posted by tphilakone

How To Increase Your Internet Speed on Windows XP Professional It seems that Windows XP reserves 20% of the available bandwidth (i.e. 20% of your Internet available speed) to itself and that is one of the reasons that you will never reach your full download speed under this operating system. In this short tutorial we will teach you how to fix this and improve your Internet speed. Please notice that this tip only works on Windows XP Professional. Also some people claim that this trick is pure myth. So I leave it here for you guys to test and see if it really increases your Internet performance or not.

In order to fix this just follow these easy steps:

1. Click on Start, Run, gpedit.msc, <Enter>.

2. On the window that will show up, click on Administrative Templates, Network, QoS Packet Scheduler (see Figure 1).

Click this bar to view the full image.
Figure 1: QoS packet scheduler configuration.

3. On the right side pane, double click Limit reservable bandwidth, the window shown on Figure 2 will show up. Change this configuration from “not configured” to “Enabled” and the reduce Bandwidth limit (%) from 20% to zero, like shown on Figure 2.

Click this bar to view the full image.
Figure 2: QoS packet scheduler configuration.

4. Click on Ok and restart your computer.

It seems that Windows XP reserves 20% of the available bandwidth even if this option is not configured and even if you don’t use QoS (Quality of Service) feature (which is disabled by default).

Keep in mind that there are several other reasons for your download speed not reaching the labeled speed of your Internet connection such as:

• The labeled speed of your Internet connection is its maximum speed, not meaning that you will be able to always get that download speed. Your broadband operator only guarantees this speed between your home (or office) and their network.
• High traffic on your service provider network.
• High traffic on the server you are downloading a file.
• Speed limit on the server you are downloading a file (e.g. if the server has its download speed limited to 2 Mbps you won’t be able to reach a higher speed than that).
• Route from your home or office to the server where the file is located.
• Your Internet connection being shared with other computers at your home or office.
• Downloading several files at the same time with P2P programs, eating up part of the available bandwidth of your Internet connection.
• Etcetera.