I came across the site Speedguide.net which seems to offer quite a few tweaks for broadband connections. There is an interesting network card tweak posted there which gave me a little extra performance... SpeedGuide says the following: The following tweak is not documented by Microsoft, and it is controversial whether it works at all. We have tested numerous times and it shows anywhere between 0 and 10% performance gain, which we consider inconclusive. We have received over 100 responses saying this tweak worked great, and over 100 saying it does nothing at all. It worked for me so I'll share it with you: Step 1 - Find your Network Card's IRQ Use the device manager to locate your NIC click on properties and note the IRQ somewhere. Step 2 - Adding the entry to System.ini All you need to do is use Windows built in System Configuration Editor. Look for the 386enh section. Click on it and add a new entry: IrqX=4096, where X stands for your NIC's Irq you took note of earlier. Save, reboot and there you go. What you basically do with this tweak is providing additional cache for your NIC. In my case my NIC is sharing the IRQ with my IDE controller so the tweak is really neat. ;-)