Bit Torrent
 

So I have stayed away from Torrents, but I found out Top Gear is out there.

I downloaded the Bit Torrent client, and it is slow as a dog. I have used other p2p clients, and nothing this slow. I am getting 44 seeds and 6 peers and only 1.4k down. FYI - RR Cable Modem 5mb down/384 up.

Am I missing something?

.ps I had read that some ISPs are "throttling" certain protocols. Would that be a part of the problem?

If your ISP is throttling anything it's time for a new ISP. They have no business editing or limiting your content, or even knowing what content you're downloading. You pay for such-and-such a transfer rate. If you're not getting it, there are a hundred other ISPs that will gladly provide it.

Try Azureus if you determine it's your client. I use that one and it's great.

I have the same issue but moving from hotel to hotel its that way. Some of the ISP's block it totally (in the Middle East) but in others its full steam ahead. Just downloaded a full CSI show in 45 minutes recently, so the bandwidth here is good!

pm me and i will give you a direct site...it will download at over 600k all the toop gear from this..and fifth gear too

I use Azureus also. Older version is better on OSX, don't know about XP.

You should always seed, the more you contribute the more you will be rewarded with bandwidth.

If you are on XP then open the max TCP connections. XP defaults to 10 TCP connections which will limit the number of peers that you can connect to. Try 50 connections, more is not always better and a lot of seeds don't have that many peers anyway so only open as far as makes sense.

I disagree. I live in an area with a big university. If they didn't throttle down torrent traffic, the rest of us in the area would have very slow internet access.

Shareaza is also a good client that supports both Gnutella networks, eDonkey2000, and torrents.

I think his point which I agree with is if you are paying for a level of service then that is what you should expect to receive.

Imagine if you went to the gas station and paid for 93 Octane and then discovered that they pumped you 87 instead.

Would you accept the explanation that 93 is in high demand and your 911 gets poor mileage so they gave you 87 to make sure there was enough 93 to go around?

I have been using utorrent, seems pretty straight forward but some things can take an age to download.

If you can't be bothered with the hassle and also want to avoid slowly filling your hard drives. BBC I Player has the most recent Top Gear as a feed...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b008m4dy.shtml

Also if you are a bit of an Evel Kineval fan the this is pretty good if a tad emotional.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b008l30z.shtml?filter=category%3A100005&start=4&sc ope=iplayercategories&version_pid=b008l2zx

Sometimes you just get unlucky too. I've had a single torrent go from like 3k to over 128k and back over a period of hours. If the peers are limiting their bandwidth way down, it can be a problem. Also some peer software limit downloads to the available upload speed. :)

that only works if you in a uk domain...i can't use it.:(

Change your name server.

I have on occasion resorted to using a German public name server to get to a certain torrent site that is blocked from US access.

http://www.opennic.unrated.net/public_servers.html

also, in the help menu for slow downloads, you should open a port on your firewall/router and point it to the IP of your computer, it will help with speed.