Speeds below 1 kB/s

[colleenosaurus]

So I'm completely new to using uTorrent and I'm by no means a computer expert, so forgive me if I describe things poorly. I downloaded uTorrent three days ago and was really careful about follow all the setup steps. I read the setup guide, ran speed tests, and tested my port. The first day I used uTorrent, my upload speeds were, on average, 12-15 kB/s. Over the past two days, however, my upload speeds have consistently been below 1 kB/s. Today, it got up to maybe 2.6 kB/s but 90% of the time it's been under 1.

I've been reading a bunch of posts about speed problems, including this one by Ultima: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=15992, but none of the things they suggest improve my speed. I followed all the firewall setup guidelines (I just have Windows Firewall so it was pretty easy) and did the Glasnost ISP throttling test, which showed that everything was working fine.

My speed test results were:

D: 9.46 mb/s U: 2.27 mb/s

D: 7.0 mb/s U: 2.94 mb/s

D: 1.86 mb/s U: 1.25 mb/s

D: 5.45 mb/s U: 1.74 mb/s

D: 0.97 mb/s U: 1.6 mb/s

I've tried setting my upload speed at both 1 mb and 2 mb but noticed no difference between them. I did all the math with dividing by 8 and multiplying by 0.7 and set my maximum upload rate at 172 kB/s.

I enabled outgoing protocol incryption, incoming legacy connections, UPnP port mapping, NAT-PMP port mapping, and pper.lazy_bitfield. I don't know what any of that stuff is supposed to do, but none of it affected my upload speeds.

I'm using Windows XP and my ISP is Cox. net.max_halfopen is set to 8. The status light in the status bar is green. I have Webroot Spy Sweeper and Avira AntiVir Personal installed on my computer.

When I run the speed test, the summary includes this warning: Warning: ISP upload compression was detected. Your upload speeds may be inaccurate.

I assume this means that my speed setting is wrong, but I'm not sure what it should be if not 1 or 2 mb/s.

I'd really appreciate some help on this, preferably in very simplistic terms, because I can't figure out what else I should be doing to get my upload speed to where it should reasonably be. Thanks!

[Switeck]

Your upload speed probably cannot sustain much faster than 1 megabit/second...so use those settings from my speed guide (2nd link of my signature.)

Did you try the test torrents (1st link in my signature) to see if they are equally slow?