So I went to stream a movie (DVD) off my Windows Home Server (Windows Server 2003 based) to my Windows Media Center 2005 (XP 32-bit) and encountered CONSTANT stuttering. The night before I had watched a movie with no problems. I spent about 5 hours trying to figure out what had happened - both machines had a "Your computer was recently updated!" message from automatic updates. I knew I was in serious trouble.
I spent a long time trying to troubleshoot codecs (both audio and video) and going through all manner of issues. I mucked around with the registry on both machines as I narrowed down the problem to horrible, horrible gigabit network performance. I watched the networking performance through Task Manager on the server and saw my network usage NEVER go above 1%.
Then finally I came across the hotfix from Microsoft to unfuck the hotfix automatic updates kindly installed for me:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496/
Now network utilization hangs out at 25% while copying a 7 GB file across my gigabit network.
And I've learned the lesson I seem to learn every 6 months or so - pretty much every time a new install of Windows or a new PC comes online in my house - disable Automatic Update. If you don't - you will regret it.
Update: I also had to install a hotfix rollup for Windows Media Center 2005 available from Windows Update and reboot the machine to put my network bandwidth consumption at something over 0.5% which is apparently what I need to play DVDs without stutters... though /sigh there is *still* some stuttering but not nearly as bad as before.
Update[2]: FINALLY. I ran across this:
http://www.winaims.com/network_patch.html
So on my Windows Media Center machine I fired up regedit again and did:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanworkstation\parameters
Key: ReadAheadGranularity
Type: DWORD
Value: 0
rebooted, and now network utilization seems to stay at a constant 20% when copying a 6 GB file over my network.
Finally I can sleep with a minor feeling of accomplishment.
