New to downloading

Hello

We are new to downloading. We originally purchased and used Ares Ultra. We decided to move to this site because the majority of films available on Ares were in Spanish, French or Italian, and even though we downloaded films with recognised names, more than 10% of them were pornographic. Our download speed with Ares was up to 120kbs/sec and we were always able to do other things like receive emails, make VOIP calls and use the web at the same time with no loss of speed for anything. We would very often be able to download 3 films during the night and all was well.

However, although we are finding this site much better for choice of films, we do have a problem in that we cannot do anything else when uTorrent is running - no emails, no surfing, no VOIP calls. It's as if all the energy is being used by the downloading and there's nothing left for anything else. We allow uploads, have ticked 'unlimited' on the download limit, do not run any firewall but cannot get any more than about 17-18kbs/sec. Painfully slow you'd agree?

We are on broadband with 1MB speed and we use a Zoom 5554A router. Does anyone think that increasing to the next level of broadband speed (8MB) would be the answer. My gut feeling is that it shouldn't make any difference whatsoever, but I'm no expert.

One thing we have found whilst looking through this forum is that everyone seems so friendly and willing to give good advise so we're sure there is someone out there who can help us. We are open to all suggestions.

Welcome and happy new year!

Some things I would recommend. Yes uTorrent is a filesharing application, and it does bittorrent protocol which ares also supports, however it is specialized for this protocol therefore if you would read-up on the Guides page (first downloading the help file to get you acquainted with the uT interface / GUI) and get some background that will benefit you GREATLY in the short-term and may help you long term as well. After that please be sure you have used the Setting up your connection... guide, and looked through the "What is bittorrent" to explain some of the terms.

As far as something specific to your connection, to start out in the Speed Guide (Ctrl-G from the main UI) and click on "speed test". First I have a feeling you are set to default, and not customized to your connection. Since a primary tenet of bittorrent and torrenting is based upon upload you will notice the listings in the dropdown are xx/64, etc. The first number is download (in the speed test) and essentially irrelevant. The second is measured in kbps, which you get from your ISP "plans & services" page or a speedtest. Please also note that with your 120 KiBps experienced download speed from Ares might not directly correlate to maximum sustained throughput in uT. That speed is consistent with 1 Mbit download package from your ISP, and to verify you are still on this, testing out a torrent downloaded from Open Office should work just fine and you should experience that same speed.

The OpenOffice torrent also allows you to verify the "Setting up your Connection" guide's relevant § for port forwarding. If you see the network status light as a green and if you see "I" flags under the Peers tab when running it, it verifies that you are setup for optimal uploading (and therefore downloading) from each swarm of peers you will be connecting to to get your content.

Like I said, alot of this is getting accustomed to the new way of doing things, but if you have trouble as you say, please post here someone will always be glad to help you.