help with speeding up downloads

ive tried following all kinds of guides. my port is forwarded correctly. i've tried capping my up and down speeds. i run vista with verizon isp. my upload is 156 kbps, and my down is 861kbps. my head hurts from beating it off my desk trying to figure it out! im very new to this computer thing and just am plain frustrated! any help (in great details) would be so much appreciated! thanks in advance!

 

So, what's wrong with your download speed? What speed do you pay for and what type of connection do you have?

 

those are what verizon said i pay for. i have dsl. however when downloading a torrent for ex. my download only gets to 30, maybe 40 kB/s. is that what it should be doing?

 

Torrents are seed dependent you will very rarely get full speed.

 

It looks like you are on the lowest tier of Verizon plans. You are paying something under $20/mos. ?

Basically, you can do a speed test with nothing downloading and nothing uploading to see what your line is capable of allowing. This is accurate for non-torrent applications.

You then take those results and divide by 8 to get the kB's that torrents use as a measurement of speed.

So if the 861 and 156 are your speed test results the best you can ever hope for on torrents is (861/8=107kB download and 156/8=19kB upload).

Since torrent clients prioritize users by upload speed, you will rarely see your maximum download speed for a torrent because you can only upload rather slowly. With a maximum upload of 19kB you actually want to set it at about 16-17kB. I generally find that torrents download about 2-2.5 times faster than they upload. So if ou upload at 17kB you can expect 35-45kB download. If you are serious about using torrents it may be worth it to go up a tier with Verizon to the 3mbps plan as this gives an upload speed of about 74kB and a download of about 280kB. Although, you will rarely see the 280kB download, more likely in the 100-200kB range on a well seeded torrent.