More Simultaneous Downloads in IE7

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 has that strange limitation that you can only download two files simultaneously. This may  not bother casual downloaders but what if you have to download many files in a short time? Sure, you can use a download manager to download all the files and forget about the limit in Internet Explorer. A nice download manager is Orbit for instance, which I reviewed earlier this year.

If you are on a fast connection you may not want to use a download manager anymore for the purpose of downloading relative small files from the Internet. A better way would be to boost the number of simultaneous downloads in Internet Explorer 7 from 2 to a higher value . As always the setting is hidden deep inside the registry. To start the Windows Registry editor press Windows + R, type regedit and hit enter.

Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Internet Settings and create the following two DWord (32 bit) keys by right-clicking in the right pane. Name the first MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and set it to a number greater than 2. This is the amount of simultaneous downloads from now on.

Create a second registry entry called MaxConnectionsPerServer and give it the same value that you have selected above. Close everything and restart your computer. I would suggest you test the settings with large enough files to see if this brought the desired effect. If you encounter problems you can reduce the number that you entered in both registry keys.

In the example above, you will notice that both values have been set to 10, which means that Internet Explorer allows up to 10 simultaneous downloads which can really improve the time it takes to download multiple files in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The setting is valid for all recent versions of Internet Explorer and not only Internet Explorer 7.

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