Filed under: OS Updates, Utilities, Windows, Freeware, P2P, Windows x64
Patch Windows 7 tcpip.sys for faster torrent downloads

If you're running Windows 7 beta (or one of the plethora of leaked post-beta builds), Half-Open Limit Fix is a small, portable utility that is compatible with your OS and will patch your tcpip.sys in just a few clicks.
Download the application, launch it, and click the button for your preferred language - nearly a dozen are supported. Most sites recommend using 50-100 and the program will default to 100. If you want to, change it - otherwise, just click add to tcpip.sys and reboot.
Once Windows has loaded again you can head to your torrent app's configuration screens and adjust your connection preferences to utilize the new half-open connection setting (TorrentFreak has a good tutorial for uTorrent and BitComet).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brandon said 12:30PM on 4-14-2009
Patching a system file is very dangerous and will likely cause you problems either right away or down the road.
Windows 7 already removes the half-open connection limitation, so this utility won't even do anything.
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Lee Mathews said 12:31PM on 4-14-2009
Interesting, Brandon, and thanks for the comment.
Any idea why the app reports 10 max connections, or is it just that Windows 7 handle things in a totally different way?
polobunny said 1:01PM on 4-14-2009
There's nothing like such as far as I know. Rumors for Windows Vista SP2 having no TCP half-open connections limit although I haven't confirmed them myself.
In Windows 7 they are present as far as I can look.
Windows Vista pre-SP1 was supposed to be much better than Windows XP in handling the connections (automatically increasing/decreasing the number), but truth be told it just never worked right. All this headache can be saved by simply applying a TCP half-open patch or patching it yourself using a hex editor, if for some reason you don't trust an automatic tool.
Jason said 1:29PM on 4-14-2009
I didn't know anything about this half-open connection limit. I'm using BitTorrent mostly on Xp-SP3, and while its patchers are easy to find on my own, it was good to know of this limit in the first place. Thanks!
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Brian said 2:46PM on 4-14-2009
How do you edit Windows vista's half-open connection limit?
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t3yf5g said 3:02PM on 4-14-2009
Unless you are running a server, your OS is limited to only 10 concurrent connections. No matter what tweak you do.
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mxxcon said 5:33PM on 4-14-2009
you are very wrong about this one.
you misunderstand 10 concurrent connections of XP's IIS with normal tcp/ip connections.
these are very different things.
mxxcon said 5:36PM on 4-14-2009
instead of permanently hacking your tcpip.sys file, use TCP-Z to in-memory patch it. http://deepxw.blogspot.com/2009/01/tcp-z-center.html
this change will last until the next reboot. if you want to make this change persistent, you can make tcp-z start on bootup or patch tcpip.sys like the original article.
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