EasyMTU, The history of EasyMTU

In 1997 I downloaded AXCEL216 Windows 95 tips and read about tweaking MaxMTU for improving Internet download speed. It described how to tweak the registry and included some registry files. The problem with the registry files is that the place of the MaxMTU setting differs on every machine. It depends on modem bindings. So on one day I decided to make a program which traces the bindings and only changes the right registry keys. I uploaded the program to Windows 95.com and Nonags (the best freeware Internet site) and EasyMTU became very popular. In two weeks it was on the top ten list of ftp.download.com. Over twenty thousand users downloaded it in two weeks.

With the success of EasyMTU for Windows 95, many people asked if there was a version for Windows NT too. So I searched the Internet for the right settings for Windows NT. The Windows NT 3.5x/4.0 TCP/IP stack was designed to self-tune itself in most environments. It means that it changes the settings for MTU, MSS and DefaultRcvWindow on the fly, depending on the route on the Internet. It will start with large settings and changes them to lower if necessary. This seems okay but I think that the routing on the Internet changes so much that it costs too much time to change the settings. That’s why I added Windows NT support in EasyMTU 2.01 beta. A lot of users tested this beta version and they had some good results.

George from AXCEL216 asked me if I could add his AOL MAxMTU fix in EasyMTU. George and a selected group of AOL users tested the first versions of EasyMTU for AOL extensively. After four beta tests, EasyMTU 2.12 was born. Therefore it was the first program that covered the MaxMTU fix for AOL!
Other programs did make a FindMTU program but they implemented it ugly. All programnms I know of use the ping utility to find the MaxMTU. I waited with the implementation until I was sure to have a fast and reliable solution. First FindMTU was a stand alone utility. From version 3 it is now part of EasyMTU.