Windows

Most browsers are set to limit you to 2 connections to a specific web site at a time.
There are a number of very good reasons for this limit.

1. Each additional file you begin downloading is allocated a portion of your connection bandwidth.
With each new file that is downloading, the amount of time for in process downloads increases.

2. Sites need to limit server traffic so that multiple users can download 1 or 2 files at a time without slowing the system down.

3. Even though you can open multiple downloads and browser windows, your Internet connection is a serial data stream. The more activity you attempt, the more data packets back up at various points along the web. This can potentially create a slowdown for other people connected to your ISP.

4. The more different data streams you attempt to access at once, the greater the risk of a packet being lost or mis-directed.
Once a data packet gets lost or corrupted, that packet needs to be sent from the server again.
This can cause the total download time to be longer for downloading multiple files at once than downloading each file one at a time.

I know what to change for the Mozilla / Firefox browsers to increase the connection limit. But don't know the "hack" for IE.

There are several other ways around this issue:

Use a download manager.
Some download managers can be set to either sequentially download the files selected, or to download as many files at once as possible.

Open multiple IE Windows to the specific web site.
Each IE window establishes it's own unique connection to the web site.

Chas

I use "GetRight" as a download manager. I believe you can get it at http://www.getright.com It is free to try and pay if you like it. I can do up to 6 downloads or so, but as mentioned above, it slows everything down!

Found this at www.onecomputerguy.com

"Downloading More than Four Files at a Time

Submitted 6/18/00

Normally you can only download four files at a time with Internet Explorer.
To increase that to as many as you want:

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
3. Change the MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server to whatever number you want
4. Change the MaxConnectionsPerServer to whatever number you want"

However, the key does not exist on my XP system.

Registry edits can cause problems so procede with due caution.

Chas

This question was closed by the author