Help with BitTorrent

Okay...I sort of missed the train when BitTorrent came to town...but I downloaded the program and have visited a couple sites and now that I've got one download going...I have a question...

HOW LONG DOES THIS THING TAKE?!?!

I've been downloading the same program - it's a little over 1 gig in size - for two days now....I'm at the 50% mark as we speak and my download rate is like 2 kiB/s.........what?!? I have friggin DSL man...am I missing something? Is this normal??

Its all dependent on the ppl that have the file and are uploading it. If they arent uploading that fast you wont be downloading that fast.

Okay...so this guy I'm getting it from could have a dial-up....

Here's what I don't get - I thought torrent also gave you the ability to download from multiple hosts and that the information was shared on a server which also helped to speed things along...maybe I'm way off there...

But the reason I ask is that before I decided to download it, it said the connection was "very good" and so I figured that it must be cable, dsl or above...this was at suprnova.org....is there a better place I can go that will actually tell me the internet connection of the provider?

Thanks dlm...

BitTorrent is crap Enron. Try using news groups? Usenet? Just giving options.....

I always heard the files found on Bittorrent are more reliable and less likely to contain viruses and Trojans than those found on kazaa or other P2P programs.

This is true, but things such as Usenet are not P2P, they are server based. You pay for service, but it comes back ten fold. No matter what you use, there is always some jerk putting viruses and trojans out there. I been using news groups for about 10 years. Plus is done right, you can be invisible....

Well - apart from it taking forever and a day to download, your advice was enought o make me trash my download bobafett...lol

I'm not familiar with using news groups or usenet for downloading various things - I'd be interested in any information you can provide...

For smaller files tho I like to use Ares...no pop-ups and it's usually pretty quick and has what I'm looking for...

www.suprnova.org

I use this, it can handle multiple connections through one port which makes doing port forwarding much easier.
azureus.sourceforge.net...

So are you behind NAT/router?
(if your PC's IP starts with 10.0. or 192.168 you are behind it)

[Edited on 9-9-2004 by E_T]

behind a firewall or router,

You need to open the ports for bittorrent. Try ports 6881 through 6999. This will dramatically increase the downloads upto around 40-330Kbps depending on seeds for the file u have requested.

Originally posted by bobafett1972
BitTorrent is crap Enron. Try using news groups? Usenet? Just giving options.....

Yeah...that's probably why is has become so popular over time and why you can find just about everything on it.

Yeah...it's crap. Me not liking something automaticly makes it crap.

Usenet can be awesome too for finding stuff, but it's by far the less user-friendly way of downloading stuff. Tried to mess with Forte Agent about 3 times so far, and I always got tired and pissed off because I was never able to download anything, and I work with computers all day, just to give you an idea.

[Edited on 21-9-2004 by m0rbid]

Yeah - I've kind of given up trying...seems to me to be too much effort and not enough results...

Hell - I downloaded Dodgeball from Ares yesterday in about an hour...judging by my previous attempts with BitTorrent it would have taken me..ohhh...about 3 weeks -

No offense to those who use it - I'm sure if you've got it figured out, it's great...but I'll stick with my old school P2P approach....