Speeding up your Broadband / Net Connection

All of us keep complaining about the broadband connections we are using.. There are some settings which i found out by browsing for some good amount of time. Just thought of sharing it with you all ..

TORRENTS - i guess that is what the main purpose of taking unlimited connection for all of us.. Of course bit-torrent is one of the best source of getting any latest thing. We also need to know some of the tweaks which can be done in the Bit-torrent clients for better speeds.. Bit-Torrent & uTorrent are some of the good performing and light weight clients.. they consume ur CPU only a bit . Now some of the points to consider are --

a). Port forwarding - its very necessary to make sure that port forwarding is done and the small green tick symbol comes at the bottom of your client. The procedure to do this depends on what modem are u using.. The best way to do is checking out the procedure for your modem on portforward.com. They have a good collection of all the modems in use.

b). for the speeds which we r getting here.. its better if we actually do one download at a time.

c). in the Bandwidth setting of the client, u can do the setting as shown in the image below.. (these are for a 256kbps connection)..

d). make sure the Preferences --> BitTorrent --> protocol encryption --> Outgoing is Forced.

e). also use a higher port number for ur bit torrent because the traditional ports for torrent are near 6000 ... it would be fine if u use something like 14747 or something like this.. and don't unckeck the randomize port option, so that your port forwarding works fine, always..

f). everybody wants to get the stuff downloaded as fast as possible. under the Bandwidth Allocation --> for download keep it unlimited, --- for upload limit it to half of ur speed to get the most optimum download.. For example: for a 256kbps line, the upload can be limited between 15 to 17 kBps. You should not limit you upload speed to very minimum also, hence you download speed would get affected. (Mr. Bram Cohen was very wise to consider this while writing the Bit-torrent protocol)

For those who are not sure about the reason they are getting these speeds ---
ISPs say that ur line is 256kbps and hence maximum download speed u can get is 32kBps(i.e.256/8). Important thing to understand is that our downloads etc. are shown in kiloBytes/sec, whereas the ISPs quote the speed in kilobits/sec, and a byte is 8 bits.

g). there is one more factor which eats up our bandwidth unkowningly, the updates of the softwares we have installed.. To prevent this, make sure that while u install any software, you turn off its automatic update; or else everytime these softwares keep checking for updates, and start downloading it, even without your notice. (Adobe's Acrobat & Sun's JDK really trouble a lot with this).

h). And last but the most important, we can tweak our windows XP for better performance ..
Do as follows -->

Click Start-->Run-->type "gpedit.msc" without the "
This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:
Local Computer Policy-->Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->Network-->QOS Packet Scheduler-->
Limit Reservable Bandwidth
Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the 'Explain' tab :

"By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this
setting to override the default."
So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.
This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

Apart from this, for normal browsing speed-up u can use image blocking in you browser. there are a lot of add-ons available for it. Or, there is a simple way, as u see that the wanted part of the webpage is loaded, u can press "Esc" and go ahead with ur work.. I use this always on Gmail's homepage and on the trading sites.. this really helps a lot.

Hope this helps!! Comments would be appreciated ... ENJOY ..