Turn off Remote Differential Compression in Windows 7/8


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Remote Differential Compression (RDC) allows applications to synchronize data between two computers in an efficient manner.

By measuring differences between network files using the RDC compression algorithm files can be synchronized using minimal bandwidth by limiting the amount of data that needs to be sent across the network.

The problem here is that only Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 use this in the majority of home networks. When one of these systems needs to transfer with a system that does not support it (like Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 SP1, or below), there is actually an impact on performance because these OSes still want to use RDC.

From Microsoft Technet site we can know better for which kind of transfers is RDC suited: RDC is suitable for applications that move data across a wide area network (WAN) where the data transmission costs outweigh the CPU cost of signature computation. RDC can also be used on faster networks if the amount of data to be transferred is relatively large and the changes to the data are typically small.

Procedure

Windows 7 has a feature called Remote Differential Compression, sometimes useful and other times not, which is used to computes the difference between sizes of files over a networks and moves them with as little bandwidth as possible.

This is useful and saves bandwidth only if you are on a local area network and share files over it. For a home user, this service only consumes system resources. You can turn it off if you want it. Here is how:

Press the keyboard combination Windows Logo + R to bring up the Run dialog.

Type OptionalFeatures.exe in the Run dialog and press Enter:

Turn off Remote Differential Compression in Windows 7/8

This would open the Windows Features window. Scroll down and un-check the checkbox labeled Remote Differential Compression:

Turn off Remote Differential Compression in Windows 7/8

Click OK to save the settings. You may now notice when transferring large files over the network that it starts to transfer immediately.

In order to disable it from the command line, open a command prompt by typing CMD in the search box and open as an Administrator.

Type the following:

ocsetup MSRDC-Infrastructure /uninstall

OCSETUP , a built-in utility to manage Optional Components on Windows Vista/7/8 platforms, complete syntax can be retrieved by typing only ocsetup in a Command Prompt:

Turn off Remote Differential Compression in Windows 7/8