Now obviously a site like this would never condone file sharing of illegally obtained software.

I dont condone file sharing of illegally obtained software ...

However, I have a friend who does do this, and I was interested if anyone else knew friends who do this using Bittorrent?

My friend asked me about speeding up his downloads.

As I am a little wiser than he, I started talking about port forwarding and the like.

So, I said I would ask around and see what info was out there.

Now, obviously NONE OF YOU partake in this heinous crime, and if you did it NONE of you would be daft enough to admit it - would you?

I know windows XP and vista limit the amount of connections you can have to peers. Which in theory would probably make your downloading slower. A friend told me that there are ways around this and the solution can easily be found by a google search. I am not sure how fast it will speed up downloads as I have not tried it.
Also enabling Encryption might speed up the downloads as well. But I am unsure I remember reading on Something Awful that cable companies (rogers, cogeco, comcast) have found ways around it. Again only theorizing.

Thank you ...

Ill pass that on to my friend

I (know a guy who) use bittorrents.

just be careful with that stuff... i know a guy who got busted for it.

@ Belushi

I make extensive use of bittorent to trade LEGAL files, like gnu/linux ISOs for latest distro demos etc.

Really, I would never download last week every Pixar movie I could find.

Massage ... That's a perfectly admirable use of the torrent system ...

So to speed up your legal up/downloads, could you suggest some tips if I was to get into it?

heh, i use utorrent...and i love it.

you can choose to allocate more bandwidth to certain files, to speed them, if you so choose. i'm assuming that you could probably do the same with bittorrent.

oh, and there's a search function built in...utorrent also utilizes DHT, but you should still look for downloads that have lots of seeds.

I use torrents to share legal files also. That is also what I use to get my Linux distros. There are also free trialwares, and sharewares that make good use of the torrent system.
I like using Utorrent, witch is a windows program. So I use wine to run it on my linux Box. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of torrent progs for linux, I just prefer Utorrent. Because it is highly configurable,(easy to port forward, control your bandwith and more.)
As long as you use the torrent system for legal files, then you'll never have any problems.

Belushi,

Yeah I was a bit off topic to not address the question.

I forget things easily: in the past I've googled for methods to improve performance and promptly forgot what I learned, so I didn't think I had anything to add.

Hmmm..if I know I will eventually want a particular ISO, and know there will be tons of seeders at a certain time (shortly after a release) then I download during that window-of-many-seeders, even if I'm not ready to use the ISO.

And when I am not downloading pixar movies, I'll use a torrent search site that gives good, easy to read info on the state (esp # seeders, general activity) of a torrent - and choose the best torrent file for the movie which I am not downloading.

Sorry I can't recommend such a site at this moment, I've not used a real computer to get online in some time (truly was not last week when I didn't download pixar movies) - and PalmOS does not support torrents.

does port forwarding speed up the downloads then?

My goodness

I would never ever do any illegal downloading of anything.

Really.

*The only reason a person would have to use port forwarding, is if you have your own home network. Port forwarding is when you forward an open port from your computer to your router that opens a hole in your hardware firewall allowing better connections to your computer. Yes this will speed up your downloads.
*If you use Utorrent, you can allocate your bandwith accordingly, thus allowing for faster download times.

If your computer is behind a router that uses NAT (network address translation) then you need to explicitly state what machine is to receive what connections on specific ports or ranges of ports.

You need to find the IP Address of the machine running the BitTorrent client, and forward ports 6881-6889 (TCP) to the IP address of the machine.

Use your Google-Fu to search for a guide and include the make of your router, so search for something like this 'Port Forward Linksys'.

Bittorrent tries to be fair - so if your not uploading data to the swarm (which without the ports forwarded you won't be) you won't be able to download as quick.

Also be sure not to saturate your upload, set it to something like 20kbps (depending on your connection speed) as this will slow your download speed.

There are loads and loads of good guides on getting Bittorrent running properly on the web. Google is your friend.

Ta,

~C

Oh, one more thing...

It would be very nice to get away from the connotations that P2P file sharing is used mainly for illegal purposes.

Many thanks to the people who point our the legal ways in which they use it.

Ta,

~C

It's also used for porn

port forwarding sure does speed up the process...... I use utorrent along with www.btscene i use it for tutorials for programs I have ie: photoshop, dreamweaver and etc.

How do you know if you have successfully port forwarded?

I have followed the instructions on my router's manual, but it doesnt seem to make any difference.

Is there anything else I could try?

You can use an online port scanner to see what ports are open on your computer...

Google says... http://www.hackerwatch.org/probe/

Remember is takes a while for torrents to get up to speed.

http://portforward.com/routers.htm