MAXEXTENTS on Informix 7.3

Well I know that informix doesn't allow a table to grow beyond maxextents....and that the ideal solution is to drop the table and rebuild it using bigger extents. However is it somehow possible to work out a temporary solution by increasing the no of extents somewhere? can the alter command do this? My problem is that the rebuild of the table will take too long and I can't afford that big a downtime right now. Can I somehow change the maxextents without the reconfiguration of the table?

It depends on how close you are to the maximum number of extents. If you are already out of extents it is too late, but if you still some extents available then you can increase ALTER TABLE ttttt MODIFY NEXT SIZE nnnnn