If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been a change to the layout despite many, many promises of an update that’s because I don’t have Photoshop with me. Lame excuse it is not because I really don’t have Photoshop with me at the moment… I recently formatted my HD :) Heh.
Seems that every Windows incarnation has a half life. After a while, the OS starts to be clogged up with unnecessary registry entries; you’ve got yourself redundant programs, some settings are fucked… I’m sure every Windows user has experienced this at least once. There are other reasons of course why you might want to format, like being infected by some despicable worm as Jillian is now experiencing. The cardinal rule to avoid all this is of course, to ensure your PC stays clean of bugs and unwanted programs… even “cool” programs that you think your PC will need. Example: Use Kazaa Lite not vanilla Kazaa!
One man’s gratifiying experience in formatting his WinXP box can be read here. Though my recent format wasn’t as *traumatic*, you might probably want to install TweakUI as well SP1 as I did to ensure that your WinXP is running in an optimized state. If you are a tweak freak, then you might want to drop by Black Viper’s site to get rid of unnecessary services running in the background to free up some RAM (in English: Follow instructions to make PC faster).
Oh and also, you might want to read guides as to how to configure your router if you have one to port forward ports 6881 – 6999 to your PC for MASSIVE increases to your BitTorrent download rates. I went from a constant 5 – 7 kB/s to a constant > 50 kB/s on a 1000mbps DSL line! PS: If you have a GS8100 Hyundai Modem/Router, you might want to leave a comment for instructions. The firmware is a pain in the arse.
UPDATE 16.11.2003
Seems that this particular post gets alot of hits for “bittorrent and port forwarding“. At present, almost 50% of the hits for td.com come from the search above or something else related. I can see a couple of reasons why you’d want to make such a search:
- You’re running Shadow’s BT Client and the yellow light is constantly on.
- You’re behind a university firewall and your stupid �150 t1 university/college connection won’t let you run BT. What a shame…
- Your housemate is hogging bandwidth through excessive BT usage and you want to cut him off 8)
First of all, if you’re experiencing a situation similar to #3, I strongly advise you to:
- download the latest BT client [which is 3.3 at present]. This version apparently doesn’t hog up your available bandwidth so much that it simply fucks up normal browsing.
- Or better still, just unplug the bastard! insert evil grin
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but to make an analogy, ports are like traffic lanes to a city. Incoming and outgoing traffic for certain applications use certain lanes. For example, casual http surfing like this website would normally involve port 80. Bittorrent’s default port range is from 6881 to 6999. Shadow’s BT client and ABC (the client xlife and I are using – it’s damn sweet I tell you), allow you to change these “lanes” so to speak so that you may get incoming/outgoing data from other ports.
Certain settings on certain firewall/routers and firewalls restrict the number of ports open for usage. Southampton Uni for example, has a very strict policy on filesharing programs like Kazaa and restricts the usage by closing down certain ports unique to these programs. I was fortunate enough that Manchester University halls were lenient to allow many of these ports to be operational allowing my total transfer rates last year to reach +/- 500 kB/s on average.
[EDIT 23.03.2004]
Found this: http://sotondc.150m.com/ Don’t know how long this will be around, but joy to all Soton visitors to td.com! Hail DC++!
The solution?
- Ensure that the ports you want open are open. Read your router manual to see how it’s done. Google search. Chances are, your question has been asked and answered before. The GS8100 instructions are up there because I couldn’t find a guide… unless you count the only one I found which was in Korean.
- The method of getting filesharing programs to work on secure networks is therefore to ‘trick’ the data flow to come from legitimate port sources that you know will be open. There are tons of filesharing programs out there. A university firewall can’t possibly block ALL available ports without hampering legit internet usage. For example, if you’re hardcore Kazaa user, there’s HttpKazaa.
- However if its BT you want to tweak, you may want to get yourself a BT client whose GUI allows you to tweak port settings easily. Try Shadow’s or ABC’s. And also, here’s a list of ports which certain popular programs use. If your uni firewall allows usage of any one of these, then perhaps routing BT through those “legit” ports might be of help.
Once you’ve got yourself and your BT sorted, then it’s off to the files! If there’s ONE place I’d recommend you go, it’s Suprnova.org. Fantastic website with fantastic files to boot. Of course, this is in no way condoning piracy. We wouldn’t want to head is THAT direction would we hee hee hee 8)
UPDATE 01.10.2003
Okay… after a couple of requests for the instructions on how to “unblock” so to speak, ports for Bittorrent, here they are:
(more…)
