 Ever heard of Event ID 4226? Well chances are if you use Windows XP and are a heavy user of the Internet or if you use any P2P applications such as BitTorrent then you suffer from its effects. As of Windows XP SP2 and beyond as a method for curbing certain viruses from spreading as they try to connect to a high amount of random IP numbers. Microsoft limited the number of half-open Internet connections to 10.
What does this mean to a heavy user of the Internet such as myself and possibly some of you? Well when any applications that you have running on your PC combined hit that 10 connection limit no more connections are made until one of those 10 slots frees up. A quick way to see if you are experiencing this do the following: Click Start --> Choose Control Panel --> Choose Administrative tools --> Choose Event viewer to open Once you have it open under Event Viewer local you need to choose "System". If you click the Event tab it will sort the Event ID's by number. What you are looking for is Event ID 4226. If you have any warnings which I bet you do. Then click one and it should look like the following. 
Of course you might ask isn't 10 half-open connections enough? I mean if you are surfing the web and possibly streaming some content or using an application such as BitTorrent that should be enough right? Wrong, prior to Windows XP SP2 the limit was over 65,000 half-open connections. Are you starting to see how potentially crippled your XP machine is? Now if you are doing fine with your Internet experience and are happy with your speed for all applications then read no further. However, if you are like most Internet users today you are looking to make the most out of whatever speed connection you have. You can find out which process are responsible for the many half-open connections you are currently using with the command 'netstat -no | find "SYN"'. Half-open connections will have a state of other than ESTABLISHED. Note the PID (process id), open Task Manager and locate the process and application responsible for the half-open connections. You would be surprised what is running on your machine that is using up your precious 10 allotment of connections.  There is a really quick tweak that can fix this and I guarantee that you will notice an improvement. Download this program EvID4226Patch. Once you have it and have unzipped it go ahead and run it. You will see a window similar to the one to the left.
This application is setup to change the number of half-open connections to 50 if you choose to type "Y". If you would however like to get closer to the 65,000 plus that you used to have you can type "C" instead and input whatever number you like. Once you have made your decision you will be prompted to put your Windows CD in and at that point click "Cancel" Finally you will be asked if you are sure that you want to do this and you need to click "YES". That's it you should now enjoy a much faster web experience and a significant improvement in BitTorrent download speeds. Labels: Windows XP Tips and Tweaks
|
