Monthly Archives: March 2013

Windows 7 filesharing limit

I have a Sonos music system at home, and it’s great — I use it to make music stored on my Windows 7 Media Center system accessible throughout the house, among other things.

One of the nice things about Sonos is that it’s really easy to setup. I just point its music library at a network Share on my Media Center system and it automatically keeps everything indexed and up to date. Every now and again, however, I go to play a music track and I’m told it can’t find it. Specifically, it can’t access the file using the network share path, even though the file is there and I can play it fine locally on Media Center.

Recently, I finally figured out what was going on – a simple but not-very-well-publicised limitation built into Windows 7 Home Premium which restricts the resources used to manage network file shares. If you have a number of PCs in your house, as I do, all accessing shares on a particular PC, you can run out of resources. When this happens, any further attempts to access the share will fail. Not good!

Happily, there is a straightforward fix – Alan Lamielle describes it on his blog.

The short version is to find this registry key on the Windows 7 machine:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache

and change the following registry key from ‘1’ to ’3′:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

Then restart the ‘Server’ service (or restart Windows itself if you prefer) and everything will be back to normal again.

Since making this change, I haven’t had a single recurrance of the problem – happy days!