Windows 7: Tip for getting Win7 and WinXP to work smoothly

Just thought I'd share this since its been a pain my $#@ for the past weeks. If you are using a Windows 7 machine as your workstation and file server and have several machines for rendering, this is will keep things running smoothly.

I recently upgraded my main workstation to Windows 7. I have 4 render nodes on a rack running WinXP. My workstation is the main machine I work on but also my file server (didn't have funds yet for separate file server). It has an internal raid and was always good at sharing files among the 5 machines. Well when I upgraded my workstation to Windows 7, suddenly, I seemed to have a lot of problems with machines connected to it, constantly demanding data and sending it back...rendering. So for a few weeks, I was down a machine or two usually to keep the whole machine from freezing up and even that didn't always work. I spent countless hours asking on forums but never got a clear answer. Well I think I finally figured it out thanks to this posting on this site:

Windows 7 Nonpaged Pool Srv Error 2017 | alan.lamielle.net



I implemented these registry fixes and now things are humming nicely, no more BSOD or system crashes/freezes. Hope this helps anyone with similar issues networking Windows 7 and WinXP.

Some research led me to find this Google Groups discussion about the problem and this Microsoft Technet article discussing the solution (look at the bottom of the page).

Apparently you need to tell Windows that you want to use the machine as a file server and that it should allocate resources accordingly.

Set the following registry key to ‘1′:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory

Management\LargeSystemCache
and set the following registry key to ‘3′:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

After making these changes and restarting, I haven’t seen this issue arise again. Fixed!

Thanks for reporting in with this fix krivel, it looks like to share resources with XP these two registry keys need to be adjusted.