I have been struggling with my gigE LAN for some time seeing just pitiful throughput. well guess what, it was about 20% short and I found out why. windows BY DEFAULT places a QOS on your LAN for their update services. I changed this and i'm now seeing about 80% utilization and peak around 90% (more then likely due to hard drive limitations i'll have to get the calculator out to prove it) but this is a huge increase from 12.5% on a gige LAN

here are the quick and dirty steps:

Click Start-->Run-->type "gpedit.msc" without the "

This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:
Local Computer Policy-->Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->Network-->QOS Packet Scheduler-->Limit Reservable Bandwidth

Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the 'Explain' tab :

"By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default."

So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO. This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

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