Speed Problems: end of my rope

[narsmix]

Hi all,

I have finally reached the end of my rope. I have tried using every dowloading program - bearshare, vuze, limewire, ares, and now utorrent - and I am still facing the same connectivity and speed problems. I have tried almost everything that has been suggested from numerous forums and so far nothing has solved my problems. There are two suggestions that I want to inquire about, because I want to know if these suggestions are good and may possibly fix my problems without causing any damages (btw I am using Vista Home Premium SP1):

Suggestion 1:

This is an excerpt from one of the forums I was looking at (nivmedia.com):

Quote

1) What finally worked and solved my problem is this: In utorrent, go to Options -> Preferences -> Advanced. The second option under Advanced is 'net.bind_ip'. Set this to the IP address of your computer. Restart utorrent.

2) de-activated IP-v6 (im not using wireless so I dont need it. + v4 is easyer to note down.

de-activated Qos Packet Scheduler (this gave a boost of speed)

uTorrent Settings:

Options -> Preferences -> Advanced

I left the net.bind_ip alone and edited the net.outgoing_ip and changed this to my default gateway address. also turned off UPnP port mapping. enabled the DHT stuff and turned on the protocol Encryption

Unquote

Suggestion 2:

Please refer to the link below:

http://torrentfreak.com/optimize-vista-for-bittorrent-emule-p2ptv/

I have already done steps 1-3 in suggestions 2 and my speed seems to have become tremendously worse. I don't know how to reset those settings and I have'nt proceeded any further.

Are any of these suggestions any good? How should I proceed? Your help will be greatly appreciated as I have been facing these speed problems since I got my new computer 6 months ago, which cam pre-installed with vista and norton 360 (please note that I have tried everything else, these 2 are the only ones I have'nt tried).

My Specs:

PC - HP Pavilion a6422.me ACPI x86-based PC (dont really know what that last bit means, but thought of putting it if that helps)

OS - Windows Vista Home Premium 2007 SP1 32-bit OS

Firewall + Anti-virus - 2.5.0.5

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 2.40 GHz

Ram - 3.00 GB

Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce 8400 version 7.15.11.7824

HDD - 340 GB SATA

utorrent - version 1.8.2 (build 14458)

Router - Siemens SpeedStream 6520

DSL - 512 Kbps (i.e. I get 60 Kbps download speed as per my ISP)

Current average torrent download speed - 5-10 kbps

My uTorrent Settings:

UPnP, DHT Networking and NAT PMP enabled

Port Opened: 18050

Max Upload rate: 47 Kbps

Max Global Connections: 250

Max connected peer per torrent: 90

Max Upload Slots per torrent: 4

Max active torrents: 3

Max torrent downloading: 2

My port for utorrent has been forwarded and the port has also been opened on Norton 360 to give full access to utorrent. I also tried different anti-virus and firewall programs (AVG, Nod 32, Kaspersky) and the problem remained the same. One other unusual detail that I need to add is, when I was using Vuze (Azureus), I had the same speed problems but when I force started the downloads that were already downloading, the speed returned to normal. This only worked for a few months until my speed became horrible again. I know this is a long post but I had to do it. Hope all this info helps.