Being the computer geek that I am, I’m always looking for ways to tune and tweak my network.  I currently have an ASUS P5Q-E Green motherboard with dual Ethernet ports and a Netgear WNDA3100 Wireless USB adapter on my Desktop PC.  I typically only use a single Ethernet port to connect into my router, as NIC Teaming has caused problems for me in the past.

I recently ran across an article that discussed load balancing at the software level in Microsoft Windows Vista.  With a simple registry key, it is possible to randomize network connections to be distributed evenly across multiple network connections.

I have made the change to my system, and I will evaluate my network performance over the next few days to see if there are any noticeable changes.  Because I use my desktop PC to stream video to a laptop in another room, I expect a slight improvement in performance when running Bit Torrent downloads simultaneously.  Bit Torrent usually causes video streaming performance problems, and I am forced to disable it while watching streaming video on the network.  Wish me luck!

Here are the steps required to enable this functionality:

1. Start the registry editor (e.g., regedit.exe).
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters.
3. From the Edit menu, select New – DWORD value.
4. Enter a name of RandomAdapter, and press Enter.
5. Double-click the new value, enter 1 to enable or 0 to disable, and click OK.
6. Close the registry editor.
7. Reboot the machine.