A customer has a growing business, and role of the main computer grew into becoming the main file server.

Unfortunately, its running windows XP Home. That means a limit of 5 network connection can be served out.

For financial (expansion) reasons, the customer cannot look at a NAS solution, nor have the PC out of action while it is upgraded to XP pro (which still only gives 10 network connections).

Since the office now has a total of 4 PCs, they occasionally hit the limit (particularly if the client PC locks up and needs to be restarted, or if some extra PCs are connected to the network).

Some research reveals that it is possible to hack the tcpip.sys file to increase the limit to 50… but its not “future proof”… it might cause problems with future ms updates.

I don’t want any potential problems, and I’m looking for a quick fix.

I start thinking: there must be a timeout value for network connections, otherwise you can quickly reach the maximum server limit.

A quick search finds that the default value is 15 minutes… and it can be easily changed using:

net config server /autodisconnect: X

the X represents a timeout value in minutes.

So I enter:

net config server /autodisconnect:1

And the “server” now disconnects after just 1 minute of inactivity.

This should improve things slightly… But I strongly recommend the company look into getting a NAS solution… even a cheap $400 NAS-that-looks-like-an-external-USB-drive is better (and more reliable) than what they have at the moment.