Vista audio throttles network speed

REPORTS have surfaced all over the worldwide wibble-net complaining about slow network performance in Microsoft Vista. Now a thread on a 2CPU forum associates slow network speeds under Vista with playing audio.

Apparently playing music causes Vista to throttle network performance to a small fraction of speeds seen when audio is not being played. Network speed degradation seems to occur even when the audio is paused.

Turning off Vista's automatic network "tuning" doesn't resolve the problem, users report.

(The following commands toggle Vista's network auto tuning:

Off -- "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
On -- "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=enabled
)

One forum poster made an observation that might be relevant:

"Try turning off the SuperFetch service. My Vista box had horrible gigabit transfer speeds before I killed the service (5% or 50mbit). I think SuperFetch was unintelligently trying to cache the file it was transferring, causing the HD to bottleneck transfer speeds. With SuperFetch turned off, I'm getting 180-200mbit."

But that doesn't work for everyone, so go figure.

In this, Vista seems to be showing its legacy of "cooperative multitasking" from Windows 3.0 onward. Another mark against upgrading to Vista anytime soon. µ