TCP Optimizer unneeded (was: TCP Optimizer with Avast Internet Security)

[REDACTED]

Last night I had an issue with TCP Optimizer 4.0.4 (which was just recently released) apparently conflicting with Avast Internet Security 11.1.2253. This is on a Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit), 8G RAM desktop PC.

As soon as I ran TCP Optimizer, selected "Optimal" and clicked on "Apply changes", all Internet access became  slow ... molasses in snow flows faster than that!  Both Firefox 45.0 (browser) and Thunderbird 38.6 (a mail client) could barely fetch content (Thunderbird: not getting far enough to know it has to ask me for the master password; Firefox, taking tens of minutes just to load a very simple web page) and I ended up aborting both programs after a few minutes.

Non-Internet tasks ran at normal speed. A virus scan ("Smart Scan") was clean.

Telling Firefox to "refresh Firefox" (in Help -> Debugging Information -> the "Refresh Firebox" button) didn't help, but it obviously refreshed the Firefox settings.

A "repair" ("Uninstall a Program" -> "Avast Internet Security" -> "Change" -> "Repair") with its following reboot didn't change anything.

And of course there were multiple reboots of the Windows box (not just the prompted reboots from TCP Optimizer telling me that some settings require a reboot to become effective, or "Uninstall a Program" -> "Avast Internet Security" -> "Change" -> "Repair" prompted me to do), three reboots of the "gateway" (the combined modem/router I am renting from Comcast), reseating both ends of the Ethernet cable and the coax cable to the "gateway".

I ended up rerunning TCP Optimizer choosing "Windows Default" and rebooting, and then my Internet access was suddenly quite fast, both in page loads in Firefox and in connecting to the mail servers and downloading new messages in Thunderbird.

Later that night I ran a full system scan and, again, Avast! didn't find anything amiss.

My suspicion is that there might be a conflict between Avast Internet Security and one or more settings that TCP Optimizer makes when TCP Optimizer is told to set "Optimal" settings.

What I haven't had time to try yet is going back and selecting "Optimal" to see if this again causes problems, or selecting "Optimal" but overriding the "Host resolution priority" settings back to the Windows default values. If I have time, I may give that a try.

Or is it the general informed opinion that maybe modern operating systems have progressed to where such tweaking is probably obsolete except in niche circumstances?

TCP Optimizer (TCPOptimizer.exe) 4.0.4 can be found here: http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

Thank you for whatever insight you can provide, even if it is to tell me I can now stop going overboard in pursuing diminishing returns. 

[essexboy]

Could it not be that the optimiser is snake oil ?

In reality most optimisation programmes actually achieve little of use as windows is normally set to achieve the best functions

[REDACTED]

Could it not be that the optimiser is snake oil ?

No, it's not snake oil. Back before I retired I maintained a documentation tree consisting of more than a thousand manuals in PDF format and probably about a hundred html files providing a menu structure to access them, and there the TCP Optimizer significantly improved transfer time for copying the structure to/from the network server that housed it.

However, now I don't do that (and haven't done so for over 5 years, so that is 5 years of improvement in both hardware and operating system software), so, if I can get TCP Optimizer to play nice with Avast! Internet Security (if indeed that is where the conflict is), I'll have to do a fresh set of timings so see if it affects what I currently do.

[essexboy]

I usually find that resetting the network connections stops any backups/blockages

With windows 3.1 and up to vista there was no optimisation as such.  But, from 7 onwards MS played smart and satrted optimising for broadband

[REDACTED]

But, from 7 onwards MS played smart and satrted optimising for broadband

Ok. The system seems to have been running fine the past couple of days without TCP Optimizer's optimizations, so I won't worry about it and just delete TCPOptimizer.exe from my system.

[Eddy]

Tools like that don't do anything you can't already do with the options the OS is giving you.