Windows 7 torrents

I had a couple of items I needed to download via torrents last week. I installed uTorrent on my newly set up Windows 7 machine and got started. Now I am used to the idea that when torrents are going on in the background with unlimited speed the rest of the network activity on my machine can slow to a crawl.

It took me a while to realize that this was no the case. When I did I figured the torrents must not be happening so I took a look at uTorrent to see what was up. Much to my surprise the two torrents were moving along at a combined 450 Kb which is the maximum speed I get through Comcast. found myself in the position of having more speed than I expected to have.

A little research led me to half open TCP connections. It turns out that Windows 7 removes a restriction which was found in XP and Vista. Those systems limited the number of half open connections to 10. With this restriction removed it seems my torrents are not only going faster, but they are reaching the maximum speed quicker after being initiated.

For those of you still on Windows XP or Vista you can go here: http://half-open.com/home_en.htm to download a little patcher utility to increase your half open connections to the recommended value of between 50 and 100. Enjoy.