What does the "Priority" setting do in the "Files" section?

[Starfire]

When you right click on a file in a torrent, what does the "Priority" section specifically do and how does it do it?

[kluelos]

Hmm, you'd think this would be pretty self-evident, but it allows you to set priorites on particular files within the torrent if you want one file to complete first, or don't really care about another file. It also, by use of the "disabled" priority, allows you to download only some of the contents.

This is useful when, say, you have a large torrent of many files, but aren't sure of the video quality, so you can download just one file to check that. Or suppose it's a torrent of one season of TV shows, but you only want one or two episodes out of that season.

[Starfire]

But wouldn't it be much faster to just select the particular file in a torrent you want? I do it to make sure an anime torrent has english audio before download the entire 5GB season.

Maybe I didn't explain my question in the proper terms. I meant to ask how does the priority setting work in relation to allocation bandwidth. Does it override the bandwidth caps? It seemed when I did it last night that all the computers in the house slowed to a crawl.