Question : BITS vs. ROBOCOPY

I have a client that is complaining of slow file transfers to a remote office. After extensive testing I think it may be a problem with Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). I say this because although the transfers are delayed significantly when dragging and dropping files they are very fast using Microsoft's Robocopy.

Does anyone have a good explanation for the difference between the two utilities and can you tell me how I can get BITS to be as fast as Robocopy?

Answer : BITS vs. ROBOCOPY

BITS was not designed to be fast. It was designed to do everything in the background using idle cpu cycles so as not to interfere with applications running. Windows updates uses BITS.
Drag and drop from file folders does not use BITS, it uses SMB/CIFS
SMB relies heavily on NetBios name resolution and other factors, and is inefficient anyway.
 
Speed up your browsing of Windows 2000 & XP machines AND Speed up viewing shared files across a network

Here's a great tip to speed up your browsing of Windows 2000 & XP machines.
Its actually a fix to a bug installed as default in Windows 2000 that scans shared files for Scheduled Tasks.
And it turns out that you can experience a delay as long as 30 seconds when you try to view shared files across a network because
Windows 2000 is using the extra time to search the remote computer for any Scheduled Tasks.
Note that though the fix is originally intended for only those affected, Windows 2000 users will experience
that the actual browsing speed of both the Internet & Windows Explorers improve significantly after applying it
since it doesn't search for Scheduled Tasks anymore.
Here's how :

Open up the Registry and go to :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace

Under that branch, select the key :{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} and delete it.

This is key that instructs Windows to search for Scheduled Tasks.
If you like you may want to export the exact branch so that you can restore the key if necessary.

This fix is so effective that it doesn't require a reboot and you can almost immediately determine yourself how much it speeds up your browsing processes.

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BONUS TIP#2

Windows XP automatically searches the network for shares and printers upon connecting to the network. This is probably useful in a SOHO or home network but not the enterprise. To disable XP automatic discovery:
In Explorer, click Tools
Click Folder Options
Click the View tab,
Uncheck Automatically Search for Network Folders and Printers in Advanced settings list.
 
It is important to disable this setting in Windows XP because it is the basis of a seriouse security flaw in XP. When you click My Network Places, your logon password may be transmitted automatically to numerous unspecified computers on the LAN. Windows XP tries to acquire the shared resources list of all computers on the LAN. At that time, the users local logon password is used when the password for the shared resource is not known. Your PC transmits the LMhash version of you password.

If there are NT4.0 or any other pre-Windows 2000 PCs on the LAN, XP will transmit your password to the pre-Windows 2000 PCs during its share and print search. It transmits the LM hash which is significantly weaker than XP or Windows 2000 hashes. In order to protect the LM hash, XP has a registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\NoLMHash which if set to 1 will prevent XP or Windows 2000 from generating the LM hash. pwdump will not be able to acquire the LM hash, which is a good thing.

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Network troubleshooting

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Hidden in Windows XP's System Information utility is a very good tool for getting a lot more information about what's going on. Go to Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | System Information. Then choose Net Diagnostics from the Tools menu. The program will ping your DNS servers, gateways, SMTP and POP3 mail servers, and proxies; test your modem and network adapters; and supply very detailed reports about your settings, as well as which tests passed and which failed.
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