Quote Originally Posted by ireland
i read the link you provided but would the port forwarding increase the speed and is it an aditional extra or a need to have bit of stuff. i just want the download to finish so i can burn the .iso (slowly at 4x) on Nero to get cracking!
Port forwarding is important and will speed up your download. BitTorrent is, by design, slow for leechers who are not willing to share the parts they already have with other users. It still allows you to get the file, but very slowly. This is well covered in the BitTorrent faq. Once you forward the ports and use available upload capacity, your download gets faster. Just make sure that you don't swamp your upload channel completely, that can slow your download by slowing your ability to ask for segments. In version 4.x of the official BitTorrent client there is a handy slider right in the GUI that controls your upload speed. I have DSL and have 256k bit upload capacity available. If I push the slider all the way to the right my download does slow. But if I keep it at 24k Bytes/sec or there abouts, my download is very fast, and the uploading has no significant effect on surfing or other activity either.

You can shut down BitTorrent after it says the download is done (not when it hits 100%). But many people leave it up to keep sharing their capacity with others. It really doesn't have an ill effect. If everyone used more download capacity than upload capacity, the system would fail. Fortunately, many people are will to contribute their available upload capacity to help distribute what they got. And you can even shut down for a while, do other things, even reboot and try that new Knoppix CD, but start Bittorrent again later - it can still serve the file that you downloaded. So I frequently download before I go to bed and let Bittorrent run both overnight and until I need to reboot. Then the next night or two (or whenever I think about it) I'll also start up Bittorrent and let it share what I got. As long as people use it this way the system will work well and be very fast. BitTorrent can also, by the way, be shut down durning a download. Don't delete the partial file. When you come back and restart it, it will figure out what parts it has and what parts it needs, will start sharing what it has, and will get the rest of what it needs to complete the file.