Ever since I've changed my wireless adapter, I've been having this lag spikes when playing games. At first I thought it was just my cable company doing some maintenance work but the more I play the, more I see a pattern. It's not just random lag spikes, it feels like every minute or so I get one. This tutorial will help you fix the 60 +/- second lag spikes that you get in Microsoft Vista.

The first thing we need to do is to verify if we do in did get 60 +/- second lag spikes. The easiest way to do this without using any third party applications is through the command line. So go ahead and click on Start -> Run and then type CMD.

After that type ping -n 300 joinpgn.com >> ping.txt and hit Enter.

Let's brake that down real quick...what that whole line does is tell ping to do it 300 times which is the equivalent of 5 minutes since each ping = 1 second so 60 multiplied by 5 will be 300. And then the >> tells it to put all the output to ping.txt.

Once it's done, go ahead and take a look at your ping.txt file. If you see spikes and it looks like it's occurring around the 60 second mark, then most likely you have this problem. Take a look at my ping.txt snapshot, I get it pretty much every minute with the addition of some random packet loss. Time to fix it...

Pinging joinpgn.com [208.69.150.249] with 32 bytes of data:
...
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=54ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=56ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=1147ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
...
Ping statistics for 208.69.150.249:
Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 295, Lost = 5 (1% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 53ms, Maximum = 1337ms, Average = 67ms

The easiest way to fix it is by downloading the Vista Anti-Lag from Codecase . It's a free application by Julian Meisel which has a very small footprint. And all you have to do is click 'Activate' and keep it minimized.

Now do another ping log. This time saving it to ping2.txt so we can compare the two files.

Here's what it looks like after Vista Anti-Lag has been activated.

Pinging joinpgn.com [208.69.150.249] with 32 bytes of data:
...
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=57ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=53ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=57ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=54ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Reply from 208.69.150.249: bytes=32 time=53ms TTL=54
...
Ping statistics for 208.69.150.249:
Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 300, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 53ms, Maximum = 70ms, Average = 55ms

See the big difference now? I got 0 packet loss and 0 spikes. Lag spikes in FPS games could ultimately mean frag or get frag and this definitely help me stop skipping.

If you can not understand German, I've mirrored version 1.1.1.

• JoinPGN.com Mirror