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Posted
on July 02, 2001 by Toby
Crundwell & Thomas
McGuire
Check for Operating
Systems or General Software
prices here.
Now
that it has become economically viable (& available), many people are
choosing ISDN. ISDN Terminal Adapters (TAs) are rather more limited in how they
can be tweaked. However there are still several things you can do to improve
performance.
Updating
drivers/Identifying the TA
First
of all you should update your drivers. If you know how to do this then skip the
next section. Hold ALT & double click on my computer, select
the Device Manager tab & open up the Network Adapters tree.
You
should see your ISDN card listed. Remember your exact model, as many
manufacturers release several different versions of the same card, each needing
different drivers. You should be able to find all the drivers you need at Windrivers.
Update your driver using the instructions provided; some cards (like my one, for
instance) have to have the old drivers uninstalled before the new ones can be
installed.
If
you are using Windows 95 or 98 still then you should be sure to install the Dial-Up
Networking 1.4 upgrade. This includes an updated TCP/IP stack (For Windows
95) as well as other improvements to stability & security (e.g. 128-bit
encryption).
General
tweaking
Once your drivers are updated open My Computer
& go into the Dial-Up Networking folder. Right click on the
appropriate Dial-up connection & select Properties.
You
should connect using your primary channel (0), for the sake of simplicity. Click
on configure and make sure Only connect at this speed is not
checked. If it is you will not have the option of connecting at 128k.
Click
Ok and move on to the Server types tab. As far as I can tell
enabling Software compression does not speed up transfer rates at all, so
its best to disable it to avoid excess CPU usage. If you choose to Log onto
network connections will be about 3 seconds slower than they need to be, I
would recommend disabling this. Some servers may require an encrypted password,
this will add a second or two to connection times. The other Advanced options
should be left blank, unless you have a specific need for them (e.g.
recording a log file to analyse connections). You can safely disable (Untick)
NetBEUI & IPX/SPX if these protocols aren’t installed on your system.
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