Glad to hear the BT download is proceeding, although you didn't indicate how fast. It is important to properly open inbound ports for good preformance, when this is done your download speed may be close to the limit your ISP imposes on you. I have a friend with a high speed pipe at work who used BT to download the DVD ISO in about 20 minutes! With my DSL connection I can get the CD in about 2 hours or less, when the mirrors used to take 12-24 hours or more.

Trying the Knoppix CD before installing Debian is pretty good advice, unless you have a completely spare system for Debian. But when it comes time to install something to disk, do try Debian (or some other distro intended for hard disk) rather than "installing" Knoppix.