Any router settings to help throughput from Microsoft and other websites?

[readman]

I'm a new Hughesnet gen 5 customer and have some questions on how to get the best performance from the service.  I was a communication engineer years ago and have some knowledge about the TCP congestion control problems using geo satellites and am somewhat suprised to see a great deal of difference between different internet sites.  My gamining computer died the other day and I'm having to rebuild it so lots of downloading involved.   First of all using a speed test program the link is generally 20-26 Mbps but the performance on downloads from real world sites has tremendous variation.  The Steam site is managing 8 to 16 Mbps which is good but at the same time a Microsoft download for Directx is around .2 to 2 Mbps.  Is there anything that I can do to speedup the Microsoft downloads?  I have searched this site for a couple of days and have found a LOT of folks with the same problem but have yet to find a solution posted.

[GabeU]

I'm not personally familiar with any settings adjustments that could/would help, but it does seem that at least some people experience slow downloads from Microsoft.  I used to when I had Gen4, but not with Gen5.  I suspect, though I have no way to prove or disprove, that Microsoft's servers are sensitive to the higher latency inherent to satellite internet and it causes problems.  I could be wrong, and probably am, as if that were the reason it should be the same for everyone, but this is the only thing I could ever come up with.  

On one occasion it took me over 24 hours to download about 700MB of Windows updates.  From most other sites a file size of 700MB would have taken under four minutes at the speed I was getting at the time.  

Apple downloads sometimes give people similar issues.