HackTrick

Another unnecessary default setting that Vista (and actually XP as well) comes with is a 20% “reserve” of your available bandwidth in order to accommodate certain applications like Windows Update. This tweak is a pretty common one most old-school users of XP already know – it’s not at all detrimental and you can immediately gain 20% of your bandwidth back, increasing Internet performance significantly.

This is called the QoS Reserve Bandwidth Limit, and to reduce this on any version of Vista you need to edit the registry.

Go to Start and type “regedit“. You may have to deal with the UAC, unless you’ve read Sharninder’s advice on how to speed up your Vista by turning it off! In Regedit, navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows”



Right-click on Windows and create a new key called “Psched“, then right click on the right and create a new “DWORD” entry. Name it “NonBestEffortLimit” and set the value to zero to disable reserve bandwidth.