uTorrent Speeds

I'm getting speeds of about 6kb/s in uTorrent. This is fine if I want to download over the course of a few nights (:mad2:) but I'd rather get some faster speeds. I mean, when I download directly with Firefox I get speeds of around 300kb/s.

It keeps telling me I have "no incoming connections," and that my port is not forwarded properly. I tried to forward the port but broke my internet (D:), but it's fixed now. How do I SAFELY increase my speeds and forward my ports properly?

I'm running on Vista. Is the firewall any good? Am I better off just disabling it for better speeds?

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have the Windows Firewall set to allow both uTorrent and the port uTorrent uses through, but still no increase in speed.

All I can really suggest is forwarding the right ports, and making sure uTorrent is using those ports (in the options). But sometimes it's because there are not enough people seeding, which can be why you are getting slow speeds. That's the downfall of people 'sharing' files I guess.

For instance, I was downloading EastWest's Symphonic Orchestra Gold for around 15GB. About 80% of it was speeds of 150kb/sec (I only have a 1.5Mbps connection), and now it's going at 40kb/sec.

I get the yellow warning sign too, but I think that it depends on how many peers are seeding the torrent. Torrents can be temperamental - sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow.

Try turning on encryption?

If you have a router, it should be explained in its user manual how to forward ports. It usually involves specifying a port range or specific ports, and which computer they are to be forwarded to. If you have a router that supports UPnP, you could make sure that feature is enabled, and then enable UPnP in your BitTorrent client. That would make the BT client attempt to automatically configure the port forwarding.

Regardless of the speed of your internet connection, having a port forwarded for BT will always increase your average download and upload speeds, because you are able to connect to a larger number of peers and seeds, thus increasing the chance of finding one who has a great upload speed.

If you're using Azureus, a yellow, ":|" smiley signifies that you can download, but do not have a port forwarded, meaning you aren't downloading as efficient as you could be doing. I've been stuck with yellow smileys for 3 years now, it's annoying the hell out of me.

If you're going to turn on encryption to prevent "traffic shaping", you should enable fallback options, else you would probably dramatically reduce the amount of potential seeds/peers.

It's probably traffic shaping by your ISP that is causing the slow speeds. Protocol encryption will work on hardly any ISPs now, since they've wised up and are using deep packet inspection now. If it's shaping, you probably don't have any option other than to switch ISPs.
Having said that, if it does fix the problem, you can prevent it from limiting the number of seeds by increasing the number of connections allowed per torrent and allowing connections from non-encrypted seeds.
You may also want to try changing the port which your client is using, since some ISPs blacklist commonly used bittorrent ports.

It could also be a NAT error, which is caused by traffic not being routed to the correct internal IP (or ports not being forwarded), resulting in the client only receiving about 10% of the packets sent. You need to find out where the traffic is being blocked in your network - It could be your router, hardware or software firewalls - and make sure that all ports are forwarded on the right internal addresses. Note that for port forwarding, you generally need to set static IPs on the machines you want to forward the ports for.

You'll also find utorrent throttles your download speed to around 6 k/s if you're mean and throttle your upload speed too much :p