Like many users, I too have problems using Windows Vista when browsing the web. At first it appears that you have network problems. or your ISP is playing up. You can be browsing along and all of a sudden it is like the internet is not even there. I tried troubleshooting this for weeks. At first I thought it was Norton Anti-virus. So I removed that. Then I read up on SPI firewalls, so I disabled all the fancy stuff on my Netgear DG834G, and still I had no luck.

I was also having problems with Trillian connecting to Windows Live. So I removed trillian and Installed Windows Live messenger. After hours of troubleshooting I couldn’t get Windows Live messenger to login.

My other PC (running Windows XP) could do all of these things perfectly, so it is definitely a Vista problem. All of the searching on the Microsoft forums provided no joy. Then I came across this post by Steve Riley entitled Windows Vista vs Hotels. In it he describes how Vista’s network stack performance tuning has issues with some models of routers. So I have attached the guts of the post here:

I suspect that most of you won’t encounter this using the RTM build. If, however, on rare occasion you do, here is the command you can issue to disable automatic tuning:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

You can abbreviate netsh commands to the first three letters like this:

netsh int tcp set glo aut=dis

Be sure to re-enable the setting when you aren’t on the hotel’s network:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Or, using the shortened method:

netsh int tcp set glo aut=nor

Since I have disabled this I now have web browsing back to normal, and Windows Live Messenger has started to work. So how common is this problem? Well a friend of mine has Vista and a DG834G and he recently put Vista on his computer, and has all the same problems. So that’s 2 out of 2 I know so far. And yet I can’t find anyone acknowledging this problem from either Netgear or Microsoft.

Has anyone found a more simple solution to this problem, such as a Vista Patch or a Netgear support firmware patch ?