I love this TCP window scaling in Vista – I am so happy with Microsoft for having fixed up the network stack (after all, faster networks mean more Google searches, right? :-). I have yet to watch the packets on vista to verify for myself, but I look forward to doing so! 🙂 <super geek>
So what is Microsoft’s reward for having made major improvements to the TCP stack? Slower connections (and probably some irate customers), of course! And it’s all because there is software and hardware out there that never implemented a Van Jacobson TCP feature spec’ed back in 1992. This one isn’t Microsoft’s fault…
The only mistake on this one is the PM that called this “Auto Tuning”. That sounds like the computer can actually think, right! If it really could auto-tune, you’d think it would auto-tune out of this edge case, and the poor user wouldn’t have to manually reconfigure. Maybe they should have stuck with the simple and elegant geek name “TCP Window Scaling” and avoided any confusion.
All in all though, the engineers at Microsoft get an A for implementing the spec. The PMs at Microsoft get a B for the marketing double talk.