If you’re using a wireless network in your home or office (or you’re helping a customer with theirs), you might encounter problems streaming video or audio wirelessly without sutters and skips occurring.
Packet Coalescing: Enables power saving by reducing the number of receive interrupts. The setting combines some broadcast or multicast packets. Default is 'enabled', setting to 'Disabled' may help in some gaming environments. Go back to the Network and Sharing menu, disable and re-enable the adapter. With Packet Coalescing, when a packet arrives, instead of sending out the interrupt straight away, we can wait for a little while. If more packets arrive, then we merge them all together. When the timer runs out, or our mega-packet reaches a certain size, or we receive the last packet for the message/data being sent; then we fire the interrupt.
This is a common problem with wireless networks due to the number of packets which are dropped during transmission, and in fact, it’s such a frustrating issue that many people consider wireless networks unsuitable for streaming media.
While it’s true that a wired network of nearly any type is superior to a wireless network for streaming purposes, there is something you can try that may solve the problem. It’s a little-known setting in the RaLink drivers of certain networking adapters which prioritizes packets more heavily.
This setting can be found within the Device Manager (Start > Run > devmgmt.msc) in theProperties window for the networking adapter. From there, click on the Advanced tab and choose the setting called:
“Multimedia/Gaming Environment”
Change the setting from Disabled to Enabled. You may also wish to disable Power Management on the adapter to ensure it is always alive and ready for action, at the expense of some battery life, of course.
Once enabled, it’s quite possible that your problems may simply magically evaporate.
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