After installing your new DD-WRT firmware and everything is working smoothly, go to Administration->Management and set the Maximum ports to 4096 from the default 1024. (This is basically the maximum number of ports available at any given moment. ) Now, I have cable internet and doing this made my internet much much faster, especially since I got about 7 computers hooked up to my network. My cable download speed went from 6 Mbps to 20 Mbps!

Another tweak is you can also overclock your router, so set that to 250 Mhz and off you go! (I belive this overclock method is only supported with full versions of DD-WRT, not micro…so if you don’t see the menu, you can’t overclock it… :p )

QoS (Quality of Service)

This is probably the most overlooked setting. I used to work with VOIP phones so QoS was always important in setting that VOIP packets to be high priority.

Basically QoS allows you to prioritize the data depending on what you type of data transfer you want to make it super fast. Although you might not see whole lot of improvement if your network is hummin’, you will see a great performance increase under network congestion.

Simply go to Application & Gaming->QoS like shown above, and add the services you want to prioritize and set them to “Exempt”.

For me, I put http (Port 80), which is my web browser. Since I use the web mostly, I want my web pages to load fast!

I also put in some other ones like ftp, pop3 (my Outlook e-mail), and httpvideo.

Other than those services, I don’t really use other stuff much but if you use bittorrent or something, you can set them here too.

You need to know the port numbers in order to set this up. You can refer to common list of port numbers here.

MAC Address QoS

I used to work as an IT admin long time ago and I usually have admin access to all the routers where I worked. (or wherever I worked that is)

Since I like to browse the web faster and do things faster than everybody, I would always go into the admin and put in the MAC address of my network adaptor.

Basically, by doing this, your computer will always get faster network speeds than other computers in the network. This worked great so I could download videos, music, and etc…etc… while my co-workers complained that their internet was slow.

In the same screen as QoS screen more towards the bottom, you can enter your MAC Address of your network adaptor and add it. Now, your computer will be the fastest at your work! Yes, don’t blame me if you get fired for it, but I don’t think it’s THAT evil, it’s only increasing your work productivity.

How to find your MAC address?

Simply check the Details of your network connection on your computer. You could probably google this if you get stuck.