Some Notes on the Machines

with the right router/firewall. I’ve had at least three different Netgears at home over years, all mid- or mid-high range in their consumer range at purchase. Every time, I tested using OEM up-to-date firmware, and tested with DD-WRT, many tweaks on both. DD-WRT gave a little improvement. On a little divine inspiration, I just did this:

• Took a ten-year-old quad-core Vista box with three gigs of RAM
• Put in a $40 quad Intel server NIC I bought from Amazon.com
• Installed pfSense and set it up in very default fashion, exceptions being use of 192.168.2.0/24 as LAN subnet, 192.168.2.1 as LAN IP. Not using the motherboard NIC, just two on the Intel card so far.
• Set my current DD-WRTed Netgear to do DHCP forwarding instead of serving, set it static to 192.168.2.2, left it otherwise alone
• Connected one LAN port of the Netgear to the LAN port I set up in pfSense
• Disconnected the WAN port of the Netgear, plugged Internet directly into the WAN port in pfSense

Suddenly WWW and Roku respond much faster, much less latency and jitter and other delay, and most unexpectedly, Internet download speed is much, much faster, even though the wifi is still running through the Netgear. And after a bit of performance tweaking, pings are lower, from 28ms down to 22 wired and 24 wireless.

Haven’t tried Squid proxying yet, or IPv6, but will be!

A registry entry:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" /v SeparateProcess /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

which can be set up in group policy, under Computer Configuration, Preferences, Windows Settings, Registry.

This will make any Windows 10 machine run much faster, at the cost of the fancy Cortana query and search component.

1. In REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Software, Policies, Microsoft, Windows.
2. Create key “Windows Search” no quotes.
3. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortana” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
4. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortanaAboveLock” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
5. Create DWORD32 “DisableWebSearch” no quotes. Make sure the value is one (1).
6. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWeb” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
7. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWebOverMeteredConnections” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
8. Reboot.

Very interesting, not tested by this writer yet; appears to be able to handle registry to some extent. One can turn off creation of new 8.3 filenames, and one can also strip existing 8.3 filenames from a filesystem and from the registry:

https://ss64.com/nt/fsutil.html

This tool decommissions quite the list of Windows 7 through 10 telemetry inclusions by which Microsoft informs itself of our behavior, using quite a lot of our RAM, CPU, and bandwidth in so doing.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Brought to this forefront by the Beard, Mike Hunsinger.

Found this today.

• A two-month-old laptop with a SanDisk SD8SN8U-256G-1006 SSD for its C: drive, Windows 10.
• Windows had recognized the drive as a standard hard drive, not an SSD, and the laptop had slowed down a lot very recently.
• Installed the SanDisk SSD Dashboard, ran TRIM, and scheduled weekly TRIM operations.
• Laptop much faster.

One can save a lot of data confusion and server-side load, by turning off share caching on the server side. This prevent client machines from using Offline Files to drive human beings up the wall! :-)

TOSC.VBS turns off share caching on all of the shares it can, except for dollar shares. It needs to be run as administrator.

This can help a lot:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SearchUI.exe Telemetry" dir=out action=block program="%SystemRoot%\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy\SearchUI.exe" description="This rule prevents the Cortana telemetry. (This will also disable Cortana voice recognition.)"

Some very interesting data:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/networking/technologies/network-subsystem/net-sub-performance-tuning-nics

If your software is all new, let’s say 2013 and after, it probably makes sense to disable 8.3 filename generation, for a nice kick of speed.

To do it once for all drives, just do this:

fsutil behavior set Disable8dot3 1

If you want to do it for one select drive, say E:, first do a registry edit in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

you’ll want to change NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 2. Then you will need to reboot, and in an administrative command prompt:

fsutil behavior set E: 1

and reboot again, and it’s done.