mattgadient.com

Quite a few people seem to have been having some issues getting it to install. I checked the links and they’re still working. My install was the 32-bit version on 2 copies of Vista Ultimate 32-bit (2 different machines) and it went without issue, so for those who are having problems, I’d suggest checking in the WoW forums to see if others have had similar issues. For reference, the machines I did them on were home-built with relatively clean Vista installs, and were up-to-date patch-wise at the time. One was a Core2Duo and the other an Athlon XP, so spec-wise they were pretty different.

On a positive note, Blizzard did make a change in a patch released after this post that *should* make the TcpAckFrequency unnecessary, although I’ve heard from a few people that the change (to an algorithim of some sort IIRC) didn’t have an effect on their machines.

If anyone’s had an issue installing, but found out what was causing it and fixed it, please feel free to post your solution here for others

I’ll try to grab another copy from the hotfixshare and repost it.

Updated the post with the following:

EDIT: A few people were having issues downloading the files (getting garbled text instead of the download). I downloaded the files from thehotfixshare.net and put them back up, just in case something went awry on the server. They’re now zipped.

One other note – a post at thehotfixshare.net in the x64 section noted that “this is fix for non sp1 systems only”. If you’ve installed Vista’s Service Pack 1, these may not work, although if Microsoft included it in the SP1 update (no idea if they did or not), then you might be able to use the registry key. Just make sure you write down (or print) where you change the registry so that you can reverse the change if it doesn’t work and you lose network access or something.

In regards to the 400ms before and after, make sure you also added the registry key after installing the patch. It’s also quite possible that delayed ACK’s aren’t what’s causing your latency to be high. There are many possible causes for high latency, this is simply a fix for one.

In regards to the “update does not apply to your system” message, it’s possible that it was automatically installed by Windows Update at some point (or you installed SP2 which includes it). You can try just adding the registry key and restarting, but REMEMBER where the registry key is (write down the location in the registry) so you can remove it if it *doesn’t* work (in which case you might lose network/internet access until you remove the registry key and restart).

Danny,

Been a while since I’ve read up about those ping-enchancing services. However from what I recall reading, at least one of them seemed to work at least in part by working around either delayed ACK’s or Nagle’s Algorithm. It’s great if both the patch *and* a ping enchancing service work much better than one or the other alone – however depending on what the particular cause is for your own high pings, I wouldn’t be surprised if that might not be the case.

In any case, as I mentioned earlier, there *is* the potential that higher bandwidth stuff can be negatively affected by the increased amount of ACK’s being sent by the registry setting, and streaming video certainly falls under the category of higher bandwidth stuff. The thing is… removing the registry setting (or changing it to 2) should set it back to the default setting which was used beforehand after a restart. You shouldn’t really *have* to uninstall the patch itself, since all it really does AFAIK is let you change the setting from the default to something else.

However, since it was presumably working fine before the change, here are some uninstall instructions (make sure you’ve removed the registry key before uninstalling):

Assuming you’re using Vista, head to Control Panel (Start/Control Panel). If you’re in classic view, choose “Programs and Features”. If not, then under “Programs” there should be a section called “Uninstall a Program”.

Either way you should be seeing a list of installed programs. In the LEFT pane, under Tasks there should be an option called “View installed updates”. Select it and it should show you all the installed updates. You’re looking for the one with “KB935458″ in brackets. Uninstall it, restart and it should hopefully be gone.

Good luck!

Jeff,

Unless you tried installing the patch on XP (which it doesn’t sound like you did), there’s no way it should have affected the XP machine.

If I were to start hypothesizing about possibilities, I suppose it’s possible that something to do with Vista’s networking went haywire and is making your router puke.

Easy solution regardless is to unplug the Vista computer, restart your router/modem/etc, and see what happens. If the XP computer works fine at that point (and plugging the Vista machine in again kills it), then I’d start playing with the Vista machine a a bit. However, if the XP machine still won’t go even after removing the Vista one from the network, I’m inclined to think it’s an entirely different connection problem that by coincidence began to happen at the same time you did the update.

The above is null and void if you did try and patch the XP machine (since you shouldn’t have as these are vista-only patches), or if you tried adding the registry key in XP (in which case, just remove the key).

Uncreative,

I just tried both with firefox and IE, and could not reproduce this.

Try:
-right-clicking the file and choosing “Save As”
-restart your browser (possibly computer as well)

Other things that can cause this:
-Spyware/adware on your computer. Nasty stuff will even watch to see when you try and download something (clicking on a zip/exe/rar/etc link), and then redirect the download to *something else* which usually isn’t so good for your computer, privacy, etc.
-Popups/Popunders – Neither of which you should be seeing on this site anyway (it only has google banner ads and google youtube ads, neither of which should be causing pops of any sort) so a bit of a moot point.
-Another site displaying this one in a frame that serves ads/etc when you click on a link. If you *don’t* see a URL starting with “http://mattgadient.com/” in your URL bar up top, this is another possibility.

Travis,

Likely one of two things:

1) Your copy of Vista is already patched / up-to-date . Click Start, right-click on “Computer” and choose “Properties”. If you see “Service Pack 1″ listed under the Windows Edition towards the top, you won’t be able to install the update, since it appears to be built into the service pack (and would thus already be installed). However, you *should* be able to add the registry key at that point (write down the location so you can remove it if it doesn’t work).

2) You downloaded the 64-bit version by mistake.

Good luck.

korey:

I’m not 100% sure on this, but it seems to me that the decimal/hexidecimal setting just allows you to enter whichever format you want (for example you could type “ff” in hexadecimal to get a value of “255″ in decimal). Since 1 in hex is the same as 1 in dec, it should make no difference whatsoever (if you look at the Data values for all REG_DWORDS in the list, it shows decimal values of everything in brackets).

Providing that you have a line that looks like:

TcpAckFrequency REG_DWORD 0×00000001 (1)

you should be fine. If it’s had the opposite effect and actually *increased* your latency, then it’s likely that the ack’s aren’t the reason for your particular latency issues – simply removing the line (or changing it to a value of 2) *should* reverse the change. As always, be careful when playing with the registry and make sure you have everything backed up just in case….

Good luck!

adam:

The patch/hotfix itself is already installed with SP1 (to my understanding anyway). You would still have to add the registry key though (basically the indented, italisized part of the instructions).

s62215:

If you’re the one who added the entry (likely), go ahead and delete it. If it was already there (added by a ping-enhancing program for example), I’d just change the value.

You’ll probably need to restart the computer for the change to take effect.

Yujiza,

You shouldn’t have to remove the update. The update itself does *nothing* except to *allow* you to change the registry value from the default (from 2 to 1 in this case). It’s the registry change itself that has the actual effect.

All you should really have to do is find the registry key called TcpAckFrequency (check the writeup for the location), and change it from 1 back to 2. Alternately you could try deleting the TcpAckFrequency registry key altogether which should have the same effect.

As always, back stuff up and write down what you’ve changed before restarting the computer so you can reverse whatever you did if things go unexpectedly wrong.

Good luck.