Windows Vista won’t get newsgroup list from news.microsoft.com

by Bharat Suneja

Unsettling as the loss of a laptop is – with plenty of other data, I also lost my “database” of over 7000 posts to Microsoft Exchange public newsgroups :( – it is even more unsettling to use a temporary laptop that’s running a new operating system – Windows Vista.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Vista, I love the new UI, and no matter what the detractors say I would move for the new UI and the Aero Glass interface. I’ve been using it on a second/standby laptop in the past, but not as my primary one. Now I have no options but to use Vista as it shipped on this laptop.

I fired up Windows Mail client to get to the Microsoft newsgroups, and Vista would keep timing out after about 60 seconds, showing me Exchange newsgroups for every other language but English! After Googling it for a little bit, the conclusion was Vista’s auto-network tuning feature was the culprit.

I turned it off using the following command:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

Voilà – the problem’s gone, I instantly got the entire list of newsgroups!

Another issue that this auto-tuning feature was clearly responsible for – I could not RDP to my servers at home – it created the connection, I can see the server’s screen but it’s blank – no login GUI (GINA) from those servers. When I VPNed into work and tried to access the servers using RDP from a Windows Server 2003 box, it worked like a charm.

The above fix took care of that as well, and I could RDP directly from Vista. Yes, that’s weird – I’ve used Vista before on the other laptop and it never had these issues…

Nevertheless, I’m happy I got both of the above fixed, and in the process realized the issues stuff like auto-tuning might be creating for users. I’ve stopped claiming any kind of expertise on client operating systems for a while now, so I’m not sure under what scenarios the auto-tuning feature may actually be useful. For what it’s worth, these are the performance enhancements from the “next generation TCP/IP stack“.

On a second thought, this probably explains the inability to copy an 18 Gig virtual machine image (VHD file) on another laptop running Vista – it would get stuck at 5% and not move beyond that. Windows XP copied the same file in a few minutes!

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