Faster Network Browsing in Win Xp

Posted by Spark at Wednesday, June 25, 2008

If you’re on a network and are tired of waiting for ages for all the network shares to load, this is a tip you’ll love. There are four basic things you need to do in order to speed up network access:

1. Remove all shortcuts in My Network Places. These are automatically generated, and if a few of them aren’t shared anymore, Windows will keep searching for them anyway. So just select them all and delete them.

2. Stop Windows from automatically adding these shortcuts to shared folders, otherwise you’ll just end up having to delete the shortcuts every time you open My Network Places. This is a registry hack, so make sure you backup your registry. First, go to Start > Run, type in “regedit” and press [Enter]. Navigate to

 HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\.

Here, create two new DWORD values (if they don’t already exist) called “NoRecentDocsNetHood” and “UseDesktopIniCache”, and set them to “1”.

3. Have everyone on your network increase the send buffer for network data. Tell everyone who shares files or folder to go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\.

Create a DWORD value called “SizReqBuf”, and assign its Hex value to “FFFF”.

4. Just stop using My Network Places for folders you access on a regular basis, and instead, map the drive by going to Tools > Map Network Drive in Windows Explorer.