Want to speedup Windows Vista? Check out my guide on how to Speedup Windows Vista without Losing Functionality ^[1] for more tips on speeding up Windows Vista.

What Are Connections?

When you connect to a website your computer establishes connections with the web server(s).  One connection might be a graphics server, another connection may be an ad server and so on.  Once the connection has received what it asked for it is disconnected and used for something else.

By default IE7 is set to only be able to open 2 or 4 connections at a time.  If you have broadband and you use tabs in IE7 or you visit sites that use lots of connections this tweak will increase the speed of IE7 a little.

You might be wondering “Why don’t they just set IE7 to use 16 connections by default instead of 2?”  If everyone who uses IE would use 16 connections it would slow down the internet.  The low number of connections set by default is like a throttle being held back so the internet doesn’t slow down and to keep web servers from getting bogged down from many connections by only a few users.

How Do I Increase My Connections To 16?

Download and install this registry key ^[2].

If you don’t want to download and run the registry key above (I don’t blame you), you can create your own. Open notepad and paste the code below in it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
“MaxConnectionsPerServer”=dword:00000010
“MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server”=dword:0000010

Save the file by clicking save as, change Save as type to All Files, name the file something like ieregedit.reg. Don’t forget to add .reg to the file to make it a registry key.

Please note: This regkey works on IE5+ and all versions of Windows.

Don’t expect your internet speed to double or anything like that. This tweak will make most advanced sites load a little quicker.  If you’re using tabs this tweak will let IE7 load multiple tabs quicker also.

Want to get faster networking in Windows Vista? Try disabling Remote Differential Compression ^[3].