surfing69

Many thanks for all your suggestions. If I feel brave I might do both: create new partition with another XP installed on it and a live windows CD. I have 3 HDD's: C with XP and apps on it including storage of data, back up drive for storage of data (using SyncBack between this drive and C drive), and media drive for photos. Will let you know the outcome.

Thanks for your thoughts- i would like to get to the bottom of this but I am a bit concerned that I may not have sufficient tech know-how to create a live windows CD - but willing to try. The other suggestion mentioned was to create a partition on my HDD and run the program from there. However, I dont know how to do this. I have tried XP Disk Manager but this wont allow me to create a partition on my HDD. I have also tried Easeus Partition Master professional and this also wont allow me to create a partition. From what I can gather, in order to create a partition on a HDD that already has an OS installed or has data on it cannot be partitioned unless you re-format it.(??) Somebody else has suggested using Acronis Disk Director. Any help on this would be appreciated.

AN UPDATE Still cannot make BitComet download any faster. Keep trying with the Open Office torrent for 3.2.0 version. The fastest download speed that I have achieved with BitComet and this torrent has been ~ 80kB/s. Also BitTorrent did eventually (after about 5-7 mins) begin to download the OpenOffice torrent at >500 kB/s. uTorrent begins to download the OpenOffice torrent at >500 kB/s within 1 min. Other Info: Not sure if this adds anything to the potential solution but the seeds and peers stats for BitComet, BitTorrent and uTorrent are as follows for the Open Office 3.2.0 torrent BitComet: seeds/ peers - 30(200)/ 30(1086) port 19241 BitTorrent: seeds/ peers - 50(900)/ 1(232) port 55814 uTorrent: seeds/ peers - 48(887)/ 2(234) port 53514 Turning off the windows firewall did not seem to make any significant difference with BitComet.

I went back and installed versions 1.19 and 1.14 and tried downloading the Open Office torrent OOo_3.2.0_Win32Intel_install_en-GB. This time download was almost non-existent. I then installed BitTorrent 6.4 and saw the same very slow downloading behaviour with this torrent. I also installed BitLord 1.1 and saw the same slow download pattern. However, uTorrent 2.0.2 continues to download this torrent and the ones previously posted at speeds of 400-500kBps. No issue with slow speeds with uTorrent. I then decided to install Vuze and saw similar download speeds for these torrents as with uTorrent. I haven't a clue why uTorrent and Vuze would or should show different download behaviour. Not sure if it would be worth my time to partition my hard drive and install BitComet there unless for purely academic reasons. In the end the issue either lies with a software conflict between Bitcomet and my system and/or some form of ISP interference. However I found it strange that BitTorrent and BitLord behaved similarly. I guess the options available to me have been decided by experiment. I wish that I knew why Bitcomet, BitTorrent and BitLord have stopped functioning as expected. :(

Thank you for your comments. Regarding the comments that kluelos made, I was upset with the manner and words he used when apparently 'advising' me. The point I was trying to make was that experience can sometimes tempt one to act 'smart'. To be a good 'teacher' one must temper this occasional compulsion and work within the students sphere of experience without making them feel 'dumb'. Regarding version 1.19 , I cant seem to find a download. So far every download which suggests that i am getting version 1.19 turns out to be version 1.21. Is it possible for you to provide me with a link for version 1.19? Many thanks.

I NEVER said that it was my port - I NEVER said that it was my ISP throttling - I NEVER claimed that it was this or that ! I was merely flagging up an issue I was experiencing and looking at potential causes. As for configuring bitcomet or any other client for that matter, if you don't know what to do and are new to this then it does become a challenge. I suggest that you get off your high horse and become more humble with your advice otherwise you hinder more than help- you smart asre

I am not a tech wizard but I know when something isnt right. As far as I can recall, when I was on Bitcomet 1.19 things appeared to be fine. Its when I upgraded to 1.20 and then 1.21 that I began to notice the very slow downloads. Up until now I have never had to fiddle with the settings. I decided to clean uninstall and reinstall Bitcomet 1.21 and removed all the tasks. However when I tried to download a previous torrent task that downloads at 400 -500 kBps with uTorrent and approx. 350-400 kBps with Bitcomet 1.19 a few days ago, I was still getting speeds of approx 2-6Kbps. This is the ONLY task in the list. My previous screen shots showed a list of tasks - but all of these had been set to stop. I then - as per your advice - capped my global max download to 500 kBps (from average download speed = 5.21 Mbps)and uploads to 30 kBps (from average upload speed 0.36 Mbps). I also set the simultaneous download tasks to 3. I did see an apparent improvement where the download cycled between 2 kBps to 150 kBps. Still slow compared to the 350-400 rate i saw a few days ago with v 1.19 and yet there are plenty of seeds >48. I might be thick but what I dont fully understand is why I can get very fast downloads with uTorrent when its global max download and upload settings are set to unlimited (i.e. not capped). At the end of the day I want a product that can be used straight out of the box. For some reason, whether its a bug in the new versions or the settings within Bitcomet, it has stopped behaving as expected over the last few days. If uTorrent can provide me with an 'out of the box' solution, why should I keep fiddling with Bitcomet?

I have attached 3 docs with screen shots of some of the settings in Bitcomet. I havent a clue why Bitcomet is running so slow with most torrents. Again, I used uTorrent to download a torrent which downloaded at 350-400kbps whereas the same torrent task in Bitcomet was downloading at speeds 1- 20 kbps. Hopefully the screen shots will shed some light. Also I found that uTorrent uses 53514 as the listening port. In addition I have found BitComet a bit top heavy/ cpu intensive whereas uTorrent is quite light.stats_summary_scrnprnt_bitcomet.doc peers_trackers_scrnsht_bitcomet.docconnection_bitTorrent set_bitcomet.doc :blink:

Thanks for all your comments. I did try different ports and changed encryption settings but alas nothing worked. However, before I decide to investigate the settings within Bit comet again, I want to report that whilst I was waiting for a response from the Bitcomet forum, I decided to download uTorrent and run it with its default settings. To say I was pleasantly surprised was an understatement. I found that all the torrents that were downloading extremely slowly in Bitcomet, raced ahead in uTorrent with download speeds of 250-350 kbps!. Unless you have any further advice/guidance on how to proceed from this point, my current impulse at the moment is to uninstall and re-install Bitcomet to see if this solves the issue.

First the essentials; Bitcomet 1.20 ADSL Thomson Speedtouch 330 modem Win XP (SP3) Win Firewall AVG (free version) ISP: Tiscali/TalkTalk - up to 8mb/s Over the last 2 days I have noticed that my torrent downloads have slowed down to a trickle (0<->10kb/s) despite many seeds. On 23 may 2010 i downloaded the torrent http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/14624207/photoshop+cs2?tab=summary at an average speed of 350kb/s. Today i tried to download the same torrent but been getting download speeds of ~1-4kb/s depsite many seeds. I have seen the same behaviour with other torrents from jaybob. I then tried another test suggested by another post in Bitcomet forum and that was to download Open Office as a torrent download from Open Office.org. The download speeds for this torrent were 'normal'i.e. 400kbps. If my ISP is restricting torrent downloads, is it possible that it can select specific torrents or torrent hosting sites for restriction whilst allowing others without restriction? Speednet.net test results show speeds fluctuatiing between 1.2 mbps to 5.4 mbps. The Glasnost results suggest that my ISP might be hindering torrent downloads:> "1 out of 3 Bit-torrent transfers on port 6881 failed to download any data. It seems like your ISP hinders you from downloading BitTorrent traffic on port 6881 to our test server. " Before I contact my ISP with my concerns, is there anything else that I can do to confirm that my torrent downloads are being blocked?