Windows 7 - IE9 - How to increase the number of simultanous downloads

OK, coming to the experts to advise the "correct" way to increase the number of simutaneous downloads under IE9.

I read that prior to IE8 that the number of downloads was limited to 2 for HTTP 1.1 and 4 for HTTP 1.0. Per MS, in IE8 this was increased to 6 and 6 and they provided a Fix-It to go up to 10 and 10.

It appears that IE9 is back to 2 and 4??

I found 3 different opinons on how to change the registy to provide an increase.

1. Appears to be the hack of choice prior to IE8, but claims are it will work on IE9.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings
add two DWORD (32bit) Values and Value data
MaxConnectionsPerServer
MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server

2. MS advised regarding IE8:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER SERVER and modify the existing value data
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER 1_0SERVER
and modify the existing value data

3. MS advised to utilize the Group Policy

Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Internet Explorer>Security Features>AJAX then set the desired number of connections.

I first tried option 3, but could not detect any change to the registry areas stated in 1 or 2 so not sure what this group policy setting changes.

Option 2 seemed the most logical since the sub-keys were already there and HKLM makes system wide changes vs HKLU which also needs more entries.

Interested in knowing what the best way to do this is and what data values you are using.

Thanks.

FEATURE_MaxConnectionsPerServer and FEATURE_MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server are wininet settings (not specific to IE, although IE uses wininet for connection management and thus iexplore.exe can be configured for specific connection handling settings) and editing these will affect IE maximum HTTP 1.1 and 1.0 (respectively) connections per host, per process. IE9 (and IE8) actually use 6 as a default unless it has been edited otherwise (as per MSDN). IE9 actually has a different change, which is connections per proxy - the limit in IE8 was 6, and in IE9 it is 12. If you are seeing 2 http 1.1 connections to a specific host in a specific IE9 proxy, that would definitely be incorrect behavior, and I would recommend checking the registry as per the linked MSDN article above to make sure something or someone has not added an artificially lower limit to iexplore.exe there.