Connectivity Evaluation Tool

This is more of a tip for those of us who work at home so we manage our own networks and routers and were brave enough to leap to Vista already.

Many of you have read that the whole TCP/IP and networking stack for Vista was re-written from the ground up and because of this there are significant performance gains to be had with it.

I have seen for myself that this is more that true. I’m getting much faster sustained download speeds under Vista than I was under XP.

Now your laptop or desktop machine is, often, only half of the equation. If you’re like most of us and have a router at home. Whether it’s to connect multiple computers to the network to share a connection or just use WiFi, a router is between you and the Internet. A poorly configured or just plain inefficient router can really hamstring you and cause a ton of frustration.
I’m not going to get into all the steps you can take to configure or troubleshoot your router, but I will point you at Microsoft’s Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool . This handy online tool just tests to see if your router is configured to take advantage of all the improved networking power Vista has to offer.