Lowering your ping in one easy step

The bloke over at Last Rogue posted a great article about lowering your ping with a paid proxy server, and also mentioned a quick registry fix that you can use to drastically lower your ping. Several of us tried this trick earlier this week, and we saw our ping times drop drastically (from 250 to 50 in my case).

Note: I have no idea what this fix will do to your torrenting, but I haven't noticed any negative effects so far. This fix is also for XP only - Vista and Windows 7 users are on their own, just do a search for TCP ACK Frequency and you should find the answer.

The Fix

Open your registry editor (Start > Run > regedit).

Open your HKEY_LocalMachine\System\Current ControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Interfaces

You then need to find the interface that has all your IP address settings. Once you find the right interface, create a new Dword Value called "TcpAckFrequency" (caps are important, skip the ""). Set the value to a Decimal 1, and reboot your machine.

Profit

You should see a great reduction in your ping time at this point. Note, you should always backup your registry before you try editing it, and if you don't know what you're doing - I'd avoid it all together.

Good luck!

Note: The one drawback I've found is that I'm actually suffering from playing 'too fast'. I'm used to playing at 1/4 sec lag, so things seem really fast. It's awesome!

It didn't make me an instant God in Arenas though - still working on that hack.