Dropped Internet Connection

[MajBach]

Hi, all. I've only been using uTorrent a couple of months now but so far VERY impressed. Still honing my skills at tweaking and learning how to create my own torrents etc. The problem I have been having is kinda two-fold. Occassionally, while I am downloading for several hours, my network connection will drop. The taskbar says doesnt show anything wrong with the connection however but nothing on the internt will work. When I first applied a patch to allow for more than 10 half-connections and changed the setting from 10 to 50, this problem occurred quite quickly and often. I also noticed that my d/l speeds were slowed. I returned to 10 half connections and have kept it that way since. I have also played with settings based on upload speeds (when you press Ctrl-G in uTorrent). I have blazingly fast internet connection for the service I am paying. At almsost any bandwith speedtest I have 4.2 Mbits and 640Kbits respectively (even though my modem and service is only rated at 3Mbit)and this is a consitent rate. If I select an upload rate of 512k or the next highest through UTorrent and let is set my bandwitdth preferences, my d/l and u/l rates dont seem to meet their potential. I have set my upload rate to 2Mbit- far higher than I observe on speedtests - and get d/l's as high as 550k/sec and uploads between 70-80k/sec. It seems when I get these higher rates, the likelyhood of my internet connection dropping is higher. I have sinced tweaked my settings manually through uTorrent. The weird thing is, when the internet connection drops (it does this ONLY in uTorrent), I cant get it back without rebooting; even he computer really seems to slow to a crawl. I've tried manually disabling the internet connection hoping that when I restart it i'll get my connection back but the network dialogue box freezes and even task manager cant close it. Further, when I try to restart, wWindows hangs on the shutdown screen but reboots fine once I press the manual reboot button.

Because this only happens say when I have been d/l all night, I could live with the problem if thats all it were. However, an even more perplexing problem is that whenever I shutdown uTorrent (assuming the connection is still alive), my network connection will also be lost only this time, the icon in the taskbar says ' local connection unplugged'. If I do not do anything, the connection almost always reconnects on its own.

I just find it strange and I have absolutely no idea what could be causing this.

Any ideas?

BTW, i am using XP Pro SP2 on a fairly new AMD system. My internet is provided through Sympatico and I am pretty sure it's PPPoe. the router/modem is not wireless - it's a speedstream 5200 plugged into an D-Link ECard.

Thanks in advance.

MajBach

[Switeck]

µTorrent has problems with download speed limits, but for upload speed limits you will get better results setting upload max in µTorrent lower than theoretical max speed for your connection. The Speed Guide CTRL+G xx/640k setting is probably the best settings to try to tweak.

Even fewer (than xx/640k setting) total connections and connections per torrent may improve download and upload speeds.

You've also got to consider what your settings look like to the OTHER end...if you're only uploading at about 0.5 KB/sec or less per person you're connected to, then you're not likely to get much back in return either.