Displaying a Count of LAN Connection Errors

A friend told me that in Windows 2000, you can make a LAN connection's Status dialog box display the number of network errors on the connection. How can I enable this setting?

You can display a LAN connection—error count on the General tab of the connection's Status dialog box in Win2K. However, enabling this option requires some registry editing. Microsoft doesn't enable this setting by default because the company decided that the information might confuse or mislead the average user. However, if you're an advanced user, this type of data can come in handy for troubleshooting purposes.

First, navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlNetworkConnectionsStatMon subkey. (If the StatMon subkey doesn't already exist, create it.) Next, create the value ShowLanErrors (of type REG_DWORD). The default value is 0 (don't show error counts). To enable the error display, set the value to 1. Note that the Errors field looks a little odd, as Figure 1 shows, because of a bug in how the Status dialog box accommodates the error information.