Slow speeds, limited connections

[Ependeon]

I am currently having problems with my connection, often getting a yellow or red icon, though I do very rarely get a green one. My I've seen my download speeds spike fairly high (100-250 kB/s) and stay there for a fair amount of time so there seems to be potential, but usually they are very slow at 0.5-5 kB/s.

I've went though all basic recommendations such as turning off my firewalls, tweaks under the connection tab in preferences, and making sure my upload speed is at 640 kB/s (did numerous tests). So far I haven't seen any improvements.

I've also gone through the port forwarding steps and have not had any success. I am currently doing this on my laptop using Plug n Play with an ethernet cable to my router (a Linksys WRT54G), though I do not think port forwarding is necessary if I'm using PnP.

Any suggestions, please?

Edit: Perhaps a better question would be - what connection settings on utorrent, my router, etc. should I be using for this Plug n Play setup?

[Switeck]

Are you sure you don't have 640 kilobits/second max upload speed instead of 640 KiloBYTES/second max upload speed?

If you told uTorrent to upload faster than your connection can go, everything can suffer.