I recently switched to the Mac side and so far I hadn’t got any big problems. That is until one rainy day I suddenly lost the ability to connect to my Windows shares on my desktop! The really strange thing is nothing had changed…

I’ve searched high and low for solutions and found out all I had to do was change two values in the Windows registry

You can read all about it on http://alan.lamielle.net/2009/09/03/windows-7-nonpaged-pool-srv-error-2017, but for those who don’t want to click, here is a quick summary:

Apparently Windows doesn’t like it when you’re transferring large files trough the samba protocol which leads to memory allocation errors. Change the following registry keys to fix this once and for all:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache (change to “1″)

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size (change to “3″)

After changing these values and restarting the “Server” service, I was back able to connect to my beloved shares