Tip for increasing Internet speed on Windows 7

As we've mentioned before on the blog, our team has been working with Windows 7 since the pre-beta days 18+ months ago, and have experienced great success with it. Over the past year, we have built a Windows 7 migration lab to assist our corporate customers in moving their users to Windows 7.

In our experience, Windows 7 definitely has improved overall responsiveness as compared to Vista (this is on the same hardware). However, one issue that we have encountered was that accessing our Sharepoint site seemed to experience a delay––enough to notice a difference. Once we investigated, we found that it wasn’t limited to Sharepoint, but overall when accessing the Internet including our Outlook Web Access, Sharepoint sites (both accessing them and downloading/updating information) and other Internet sites.

After some analysis, we discovered that the “Automatically Detect Settings” option within Internet Explorer attempts to download an automatic proxy configuration script (Wpad.dat file) from the local area network. By disabling this option, the machine bypasses the LAN checking and the speed of accessing the Internet is greatly increased.

To turn off the automatic configuration of IE settings for LAN connections:

• Start Internet Explorer 8
• Select Tools – Internet Options
• Select the Connections Tab, click on the LAN Settings button
• Unselect (clear the checkbox) for Automatically Detect Settings
• Click the OK button
• Close Internet Explorer 8
• Open Internet Explorer 8 and enjoy the increased speed

Let us know if this works for you, or if you're seeing any other issues with Windows 7 that we might have solutions for!