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I'm trying to help a friend out. He's got a Dell latitude notebook.. about 3 - 4 years old. Whenever utorrent is running and he has anything downloading/uploading, he can not browse the internet.

you can enter an address and hit go, and it'll just spin and say "waiting for neowin.net to..."

eventually it will time out.

To me utorrent seems to be the problem, but i can't figure it out.

he's got XP SP3 and the drives for all his networking devices are fully updated. It does it whether he is physically connected or wirelessly, he's even tried to directly connect his DSL modem and he can not browse.

any ideas?

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The only thing I can suggest is to limit the download rate to something like 50kB/s. If it's usable at that point, go up from there until you find a good compromise between BitTorrent speed and regular browsing speed.

It's not necessarily the download speed, but moreso the upload speed as well as the number of connections, the latter being the most crucial. Try dopping down to 128 global, and 64 per torrent, or even 64/32. This should hopefully clear most of it up.

I recently encountered the same problem and I'll explain to the best of my ability how I resolved it.

First issue, if he has a router as you stated it can get overloaded BUT some routers allow you to change the maximum allowed connections. Both idle and active. Now, if you are running a Linksys WRT54G or any Buffalo variant router that can run open source firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT I recommend it highly. The process for installing the firmware is sketchy because you can damage your router HOWEVER if you can follow instructions you should be golden. I am currently running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 with Tomato 1.21, it handles torrents, XBOX Live, NAT Firewall, EVERYTHING better than standard firmware I've dealt with.

Second, using uTorrent's speed guide have him check his bandwidth. Adjust your system settings with TCP Optimizer (now if you're running Vista, from what I understand you don't need this at all) and also set your maximum connections TCP stack connections with TCP patcher. I'll give you an example, I always configured my computer with TCP optimizer and the patch but my ISP Comcast Philadelphia is rated at 6mbit connection BUT through various speed tests I was getting 16mbit with "speed boost" which is some BS they have that allows your downloads to go "faster." So in TCP optimizer I changed it from 6000 to 16000 and now I can browse and do everything just fine without any hiccups.

Finally, some ISPs are chocked if too much of your upload is being used. I use around 30-40 when downloading and 80-110 when I'm not.

Also, check out http://torrentfreak.com/speed-up-bitcomet-and-%C2%B5torrent/

oh... that's the other thing i forgot to mention.

I stopped all downloads and uploads. still can not browse, i waited for it, tried refreshing, nothing. The moment i close utorrent and refresh the browser, it works.

This is happening to him at home, and even at our work.. and the connection i have at work is god like...

335357922.png

so... i'm pretty sure it's the program, or his card sucks at balancing.

maybe i can try another program? anything similar to utorrent ?

oh... that's the other thing i forgot to mention.

I stopped all downloads and uploads. still can not browse, i waited for it, tried refreshing, nothing. The moment i close utorrent and refresh the browser, it works.

This is happening to him at home, and even at our work.. and the connection i have at work is god like...

335357922.png

so... i'm pretty sure it's the program, or his card sucks at balancing.

maybe i can try another program? anything similar to utorrent ?

I literally had the same exact problem, hopefully my above post can help. I would pause/stop torrents and I still couldn't browse, but as soon as I would close it... it would work.

But as David explained above, I actually raised my half open connections to 100. So that may or may not be the issue.

I tried ABC and Azureus and neither were better than uTorrent.

335362094.png

Edited by Saint Shiv
Your up speed needs to be throttled, and utorrent uses 8 half open connections. You might have to reduce that, Options -> Preferences -> Advanced -> net.max_halfopen - 8. If throttling your up speed doesn't help try setting this to 4.

tell me why it said "50" when i looked there.

set it to 4 and it started to work... i think he should be good now. thanks guys.

I believe it has something to do with the TCP/IP limit in Windows. I can't remember how I got mine to work but I'll try to look for it.

Scirwode

That so called patch is NOT NEEDED.. what is needed is to correctly set you software not to exceed the half open limit, which has nothing to do with your torrent download speed.

As you would of noticed if you actually read the thread, the OP half open was set to 50 in his software -- which yeah going to cause an issue with the 10 half open limit.

He adjusted his software and guess what.

"set it to 4 and it started to work... i think he should be good now. thanks guys. "

The need of that so called patch is FUD pure and simple.. We have gone over it many times before. Here is some info on it.

http://www.p2pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=32557

This is the most recent thread I recall

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=666548

Please stop passing around nonsense that people need to "patch" anything to get torrents to work correctly. Any site stating you need to "patch" anything to get full speeds out of torrents is passing along FUD plain and simple.

Don't know if this will help but...

?Torrent 1.8.1

This release fixes several outstanding issues with 1.8.

See, this is where I reverted back to 1.7.7. I know torrenting is all about sharing, and when I am downloading something a like, I try and share as much as possible. However, there is no torrent police, there is no REQUIREMENT to chare, so when I don't need to, when the download has finished, I will remove it from uTorrent.

1.8 changed all that. There was something built into the program that made you share a lot more than what you wanted. I didn't like that, so I went back to 1.7.7. A week or so ago, uTorrent started giving me that dialog box saying "this is freeware, if you paid, la la la". It used to do it every so often but now it is everyime I start uTorrent.

This makes me think there has been some sort of call home feature which slowly disables the program forcing you to update.

My uTorrent doesn't connect properly at all anymore.

I used to be on the "the patch makes not difference" side, but now I'm having problems in windows xp. I lowered utorrent's maximum half open connections and now it's mostly okay, although some times it is slow. I guess there is some other factor I'm not aware of because this didnt happen in vista.

I guess a lot of people have problems with their drivers and don't know it. torrent used to KILL my internet connection and I updated to the latest version of the driver and it got fixed, no patches needed. but now I'm ON the latest (EVER , by the way :p) version of the driver of my wifi adaptor and I get these problems every once in a while.

meh, I dont care

The half open connection only comes into play if your seeing 4226 errors in your event log.. If you do not have the software limits correct for your bandwidth.. Ie your upload pipe is full then sure your browsing its going to be slow.

This has nothing to do with half open connection problem when you hit 10 in a second and connections start to queue up.

See, this is where I reverted back to 1.7.7. I know torrenting is all about sharing, and when I am downloading something a like, I try and share as much as possible. However, there is no torrent police, there is no REQUIREMENT to chare, so when I don't need to, when the download has finished, I will remove it from uTorrent.

1.8 changed all that. There was something built into the program that made you share a lot more than what you wanted. I didn't like that, so I went back to 1.7.7. A week or so ago, uTorrent started giving me that dialog box saying "this is freeware, if you paid, la la la". It used to do it every so often but now it is everyime I start uTorrent.

This makes me think there has been some sort of call home feature which slowly disables the program forcing you to update.

My uTorrent doesn't connect properly at all anymore.

Well first off. SEED YOUR GREED. Don't be leech.

Secondly, If I stop or remove a torrent from uTorrent 1.8.1, then it's stopped, gone, no longer seeding.

Third, and finally. I know many sites that will not allow a new client to connect to their tracker, until they have given it a thorough inspection.

1.8.1 was banned while this was taking place, but has now been given the green light.

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