Originally posted by Dameonivich

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And how is that working for him?

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Originally posted by Colleen

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It's always nice to avoid having to run to Windows Update every now and then though.

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Originally posted by Gavin

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if i was told i would have to pay for SP2 i would probably ditch windows altogether

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Originally posted by mrmenz

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Well so far ive noticed that SP2 has a TCP/IP cap of 10 connections at one time, of course ive heard of a user created patch which ups this to 50. With a cap of 10 connections it limits many P2P programs especially BitTorrent

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- ive also noticed an overall performance boost.

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Originally posted by Xzion

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Another one. Am I the only one who doesn't have Xp?

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Originally posted by NightHawk

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Is that incoming or outgoing connections? Or combined?
I haven't heard anything about TCP/IP connections being limited, and I've been reading about SP2 quite heavily lately.

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I learned of the cap from the quote below, it was posted at Shenmuedojo.net. I believe its combined and when you reach the limit you recieve a EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts notification.

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The second Windows XP service pack has been released. From the change list I can tell it's a major lockdown on Windows XP, and it will in fact cause several popular 'educational' tools to break alongside with the worms. Examples are denial-of-service attacks through the SYN flood method, and IP spoofing: Computers with SP2 installed will have a hard time executing these since Windows will force delays between requests, or drop them altogether. Additionally, there is now a weird TCP/IP capping mechanism on TCPIP.SYS that seems not to allow more than 10 simultaneous connections (the file can already be user-patched to 50, but since I haven't tried out SP2 yet I can't specify on how exactly this issue works and can be solved).

To overcome the EventID 4226 issue (aka the max half-open connections limitation), which severely hampers the performance of P2P applications like BitTorrent, you'll need the tools/instructions at this site:
http://www.lvllord.de/4226fix/4226fix-en.htm

Instructions WITH patcher | Instructions for MANUAL patching

Additionally, you may want to read this thread:
http://www.betabbs.com/index.php?showtopic=48836&st=0

This involves MODIFYING a SYSTEM DRIVER to allow up to 50 concurrent half-open connections - this is enough for heavy users while not expanding security risks in a considerable way. If you mess up the patching without backing up the driver first, you'll have to reinstall Windows, or boot in safe mode and copy the original SP2 file into the system.

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interesting. Anything in particular that seems faster?

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Mainly its been smaller things, like when i goto to play an mp3 instead of taking a few seconds to load winamp plays immediately, a bit better performance in a few games,windows starts up faster than before etc. I guess it could be attributed to anything but the last thing I really did was install SP2, I installed it fairly early since i wanted to try it out before the next time I format and I was planning to do it soon.

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Originally posted by Colleen

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THE LIST.

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