Windows Vista fails to copy large files to network share
Encountered a rather odd error, two HP Vista laptops failing to copy large files to network shares, these would error out complaining about being able to access the source file on the local disk, which was a rather confusing way of reporting the error as there was no problem with the local disk. On network transfers of lots of files of varying sizes over wireless, they’d drop the wireless connection entirely. The only way around this was to use a cable when copying files over the network.
Following a little research this appears to be a reasonably widely experienced issue with a particular Windows configuration option in some environments. You can change this using an administrative command prompt by entering the following command
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
(To open an administrative command prompt, right click on a command prompt entry on your desktop or start menu and choose “Run as Administrator”. If you use a standard command prompt to issue the command you’ll get a permissions error).
More information on these settings can be found here. What I haven’t yet come across is a KB article explaining the issue in more detail (i.e with a list of routers this may be a problem with), which seems rather unfortuntate.
