A triumph in speed

[afied080]

My basic specs:

WinXP home

Comcast Cable using linksys modem and linksys rtp-300 router (router for broadband phone service *vonage*)

Dell XPS Gen2 (Pentium M @ 2.0GHz, 1GB ram, upgraded 100GB 5400rpm toshiba HD, )

I have been fighting with my uTorrent settings for days and have finally got excellent results. Some of my battles included, trying to figure out if I needed custom firmware for the router, trying to figure out why my router wasn't forwarding ports like I wanted it to, why my downloads were slow (below 100kbps) even when I had ports forwarded, and trying to understand the purposes behind UPnP, DHT, DMZ and a host of other strange terminology. Now I am consistently downloading above 600Kbps and it frequently spikes up to 950Kbps upwards. My upload is steady at 14-20kbps. It took me a while to get my settings here and I wanted to share how I arrived at this.

Here are the basic things I would recommend.

#1 for God's sake people, if you are using a router, use the guide at http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm (you will need a static IP address set up. There are guides on portforward's page on how to do that.)

if you are using a router with built in firewall, you MUST set up port forwarding. Its as simple as that. alternatively, you could enable DMZ (which seems to work great), but that leaves all your ports open to the internet. I believe that improper port forwarding accounts for 90% of the speed problems encountered by users. (of course those of you with your own software firewalls will need to set up port forwarding for Utorrent on them as well.)

#2 Run all the speed tests at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

A.Choose the settings in utorrents speed guide that match your DL results.

B.Then take your lowest upload speed from all the results (alternatively, take the average of your upload speeds), divide it by 8, then multiply that by .8. You now have your max upload rate for utorrent. This may need to be tweaked up or down a bit, you can experiment with it once your DLs are consistently up.

I find that if my upload goes above 16 or so, my DL speed starts to drop. This may or may not be true for everyone, and it might be a peer problem ( as far as DL availability going up and down) but obviously, if you have to much data going upstream, your downstream is going to be slowed.

#3 Read through all the guides in the forums, and apply where you can. This takes some time, but I have learned a lot just from reading and researching and it makes you better able to address your own problems. Once you can fix it yourself, you save time, and you can help other people out.

I would be open to any questions and will help out as much as I possibly can in the forums. I'll be checking up on this about once a day, hope my two cents help some people out and shed some light on what was, for me, a somewhat muddy subject.

[Yummey]

My speed caps at 30kbps, and rarely sometimes it would go up to 35-40kbps, I've never seen it go any higher. My router is Netgear WGT624, but I don't know the admin or password, and its not the default ones. :|

I know for sure I can get much more than 30kbps, I have ADSL and my firewalls aren't the issue. :x

[afied080]

did you try blank user name and "admin" as password? or admin in both user and password fields? have you googled your router online to see if there is a different default password set? have you made any attempt to flash the router back to default settings? just some thoughts.