WinMX Maximizing Secondary Connection

This page was compiled from the notes and screen capture of Axis of Evil Knievel , these views are in line with my own. Thanks for the well laid out info Axis. - Vladd44

Entering long queues or using auto-find is quite pointless unless you are able to prevent timeouts by finding a good primary connection. WinMX essentially allows anyone to pretend to be a primary, a number of non-broadband users do this to host chat rooms or are just utterly clueless. The problem with this is that people trying to make secondary connections will be assigned to these retards and will receive poor or no search results while queued downloads will inevitably timeout.

Decent primary sometimes can be found overseas, but connections half way around the world are best avoided as searches become lagged. Also to be avoided are primary users that might sign on and off to use the internet for a few minutes.

As a secondary it is best to find a cable user who keeps a connection open all the time and has plenty of bandwidth available. The way to do this is to read the IP address of the primary you are connecting to while continuing to refresh the connection until you come across a good primary. Primary connection IP addresses can be read by dropping to DOS and using the netstat command or by using a program like TcpView that works in much the same way.

1) You may have a number of TCP connections open by other programs. We are only going to concern ourselves with WinMX.exe processes.

2) If you are currently uploading or downloading several WinMX TCP connections should be visible. Ignore IP addresses ending in 6699 (or whatever you set your TCP port number to). The primary IP address will often be a port number between 1000-1999 and will not be the same as the TCP port number you designated in WinMX Settings.

3) Try to resolve the address alphabetically rather than numerically. Often IP addresses will look much like web site URLs.

4) In WinMX, go to Networks and click Refresh to get a new primary connection. If you are trying to find a cable connection, look for abbreviations of broadband provider names (.cox = Cox cable, .rr = Roadrunner). If you are looking for a connection close to you, look at the end of the IP address to see if there is a city name in it or a country code (.it = Italy, .jp = Japan, etc.).

5) Continue refreshing and checking the IP address until you find one you want. This is not an exact science and requires a lot of experimenting. After a few days of playing around you will be able to tell the difference between primaries that last 15 minutes and robust connections that stay up for days.

good = cable, comcast, rr, cox, adelphia.

bad = dialup, dialin, aol, yahoo, dsl, verizon, directv.

Also, if you are running a secondary connection, consider getting the secondary [url="../files/olepro32.dll"]connection patch]