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TweakMaster

I think it's fair to say that I have a love/hate relationship with Windows. On one hand I get pretty miffed at it at times and would just as soon kick the @#$%^ box across the room. At other times I marvel that with all the different software and hardware I have hanging on my computer it's a miracle when I even get the Windows logo. Look a little deeper. Say use Regedit to check out the complexity of the registry or Registry First Aid and see how many errors you probably have in your registry and it can be scary.

My take is that in order to get as far as it does Windows makes a lot of assumptions about your setup. This really stuck home for me when I was the first alpha tester of a cable broadband service. Other than a few employees they had on as alpha testers I wasn't seeing nearly the performance that I expected, especially since I was about the only person on the network. I did some digging and found there were all sorts of settings Windows made about my connection to the Internet, all optimized for a 28.8 dial up connection.

Not that I fully understood all the things I was dealing with. Maximum Transmission Units, Time to Live, RWIN settings? Never letting not understanding something stop me I forged ahead, make copious copies of my registry and hacked away with Regedit. Sure enough after two days of tweaking I increased the performance by a factor of five!

Since then I've seen a lot of programs that talk about optimizing my connection. Some are snake oil, some are worthy but my personal favorite is TweakMaster. It comes in two versions, the "pro" version includes an application called DU Meter that shows your performance. It's a nice transparent window and it makes it easy to keep tabs on what's going on. You can go with Tweakmaster without DU Meter and save a few bucks, but I like DU Meter and I'd recommend the bundle.

Why do I like it? First it's easy to use. If you want to manually tweak stuff it's right there in front of you.

Please click on the image to enlarge it.

But I don't want to spend the rest of my tweaking life figuring out MTU, TtL and RWIN and TweakMaster comes with a number of preset configurations that you can select from the wizard and try because at the end of the day you're going to have to try a couple before you find the one that best optimizes your particular connection.

You may not get any improvement by changing your settings, you may have the setup that Windows expects, but give it a whirl, you may be surprised that the problem wasn't your connection, your modem or your computer but the assumptions Windows made about your connection. Be if that's the case you'll still have access to the other tools that TweakMaster provides; DNS acceleration, something that DOES work for everyone. Throw in clock sync, AOL disconnect prevention, generic ISP disconnect prevention (in the Pro version) and a safety feature to restore your default settings with a click make it something I wouldn't want to be without.-- Don Watkins

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