The latest standard for wireless networking is 802.11n that clocks in speeds of above 100Mbps. If you’ve upgraded your wireless networking equipment to 802.11n you may not have experienced the performance boost you were expecting. By default, Windows XP is not optimized to handle this increase in speed. You can edit the registry to turn on a feature called Receive Window Scaling that will help XP take advantage of this speed increase. As always, back up the registry before making changes.

Here are the instructions:

1. Open your registry (regedit) editor.
2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Services Tcpip Parameters
3. Right click an empty space in the right details pane and select New | DWORDvalue
4. Name the new value Tcp1323Opts
5. Double click the new entry and give it a hexadecimal value of 3
6. Again, right click an empty space in the right pane and select New | Dwordvalue
7. Name the new value TcpWindowSize
8. Double click the new entry and give it a hexadecimal value of 40000
9. Reboot your computer to force the changes to take effect

Your wireless connection should perform faster with 802.11n routers and WAPs upon reboot.