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uTorrent is 90-minute timebomb on Win 98SE


SMCorp

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I have used several versions of uTorrent over the past year with Windows 98SE, and I have now set up a dedicated PC to do nothing but run uTorrent 1.7.7 and watch the TV shows that come from it (I needed to get this off my mission-critical business work box). It is a 1.4ghz AMD PC with 1gb RAM connected to one of the four ports on an Airlink router (and my business PC is on another of those ports), and that connects to a SpeedStream modem and AT&T Yahoo! HSI PRO DSL (which gets me 2,400+Kb/s on a good day).

I have a problem that occurs 100% of the time:

I start uTorrent 1.7.7 (it starts automatically when the PC is restarted).

Within two minutes, at least 6-8 of my 15-20 torrents are running, uploading and downloading. Total speed down varies from 50k-200k.

Within 30-75 minutes, it stops cold, nothing is downloading or uploading. Meanwhile the other PC is using the internet just fine.

I have no choice but to restart the PC to get myself another 45 minutes before it blows up again. At least 90% of the time, it hangs and won't shut down, I have to CTRL+ALT+delete or even hit the hard reset button.

I tried blaming this on traffic shaping by my ISP. They didn't go for it, and I don't buy it either, because even after closing uTorrent, it is still shown as running after pressing CTRL+ALT+delete, and Firefox won't work then, the whole computer is shot.

My dream of having a 24 hour/day torrent box has not been realized, and it is an impractical hassle to have to restart 40 times a day.

I am starting to notice a lot of crapware apps the past 2-3 years that claim to work with 98 and that claim is based on the bogus presumption that anything on earth works on 98 (even though we didn't try it). Is this the case with uTorrent? I have completely duplicated these results on 3 different PCs and not had that problem with Vista (which I prefer not to use).

BTW, I have tried all encryption settings I can, settling on "encypted" + "allow legacy connections".

If anyone has any tips to share, please do. Thanks.

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Thanks to everyone who replied, I only just now saw them, as the answers aren't mailed to me.

Is there a way to set preferences to alert me to a reply on my post (as with Mozilla forums)?

Anyhow, in the past week since posting, I solved my own problem.

The problem was 0% ISP, 0% Win98SE, and 100% uTorrent software.

Not being in the know about torrents and stuff (I just use it when I am gone and miss a TV episode), I had ignorantly upgraded to uTorrent 1.7.7 just because it told me to.

uTorrent 1.7.7 is complete garbage, and I was unaware that it was now owned by Bittorrent so they can screw it up like their own bloated client. I went and downloaded the uTorrent 1.6 I had discarded, and this problem completely vanished.

This problem was not unique to my computer or installation, as I had installed and uninstalled 1.7.7 on two PCs at least twice, always having the same time bomb. With 1.6, it will download for days and days and days with the monitor off. It does have one problem common to 1.7.7, it hangs when I try to close it. When I want to restart the computer to watch something, it hangs 90% of the time, preventing shut down.

This is not a 98 problem, this is a bad code in uTorrent problem. I understand it is an old system that most people don't use because they don't mind running something that runs 1/5th as fast, but the problem is saying it works for 98 when it does not and, to be clear, it is obvious that they never tested it on 98 but put 98 in the systems list anyway. I found that on a number of programs recently.

This was kind of two steps forward and one step back, because 1.7.7 had some small advantages, as far as I can see, both relating to visibility. One is that the text was much bigger on 1.7.7, so that I could see it from a distance, and the other was that 1.7.7 doesn't show a long row of numbers that are all "0.00kb". Therefore, I can look and see at a quick glance that I have 1 torrent working, or 3, or that none are working at all, which would be a blank row leaving a huge white space in the center of the screen that I can see from clear across the room where I am working on my business PC.

Does anyone know how to get these functions in uTorrent 1.6? Thanks.

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Regarding replies, the option is in your profile to receive text of replies, pressing subscribe postfixed to all threads only will tell you there are some without that option enabled.

Knee-jerk reactions like the one you describe are generally gathered through heresay and well stupidity. It's apparent you're not one to use something just because it's easy... however it's quite unfair to say uT 1.7 is at fault when you may or may not have read the changelog mentioning additional features added to 1.7 over 1.6 which could be responsible for this and therefore you simply don't know what you're looking for. As far as choosing to use an old version, depending upon what build 1.6 you have you suffer from at least 1 exploits known in the wild... so please copy-paste the logfiles created from following the instructions @ http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=15992

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I run uTorrent v1.8 beta (latest typically...though sometimes it's out of date by a couple days) on a Win 98SE box.

It tends to run ok for about 3 days straight...though by that point I can attribute the problems I have to other activities I do on the computer. :)

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