How can I get better speeds from BitTorrent?

I'm getting slow speeds of about 10KB/s or thereabouts. I've granted BitTorrent access through my McAfee firewall, and have enabled UPnP port 5000, both in BitTorrent and in McAfee. I haven't specifically port-forwarded my router for BitTorrent, but it's currently set to Low, where it will block all attempts to recognize my network address, except through a pinhole or NAT server, etc. Any suggestions? I don't really want to portforward my router for BitTorrent to be honest, as it just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Not sure why.

 

Make sure you have good port settings. Some net providers limit speeds on certain known P2P ports. Google it of more info.

Also maybe you aren't picking the right "healthy" torrents. Ones that are well seeded.

OR, you can try download Azureus or Utorrent and see if you get better results. I personally get the best results from Azureus.

 

Yah you need to port forward. Or, give this a try: run BitTorrent in a virtual machine and allow your router to port forward in the guest OS in the virtual PC. Then, just grab your downloaded files from the virtual PC using WSCP3 or another free SFTP client. Alternatively, you can just execute the downloaded files in the virtual PC, although you may take a performance hit depending on file type. You will, however, be protected from any damage to your real (host) OS.

 

use a better port, like in the 17XXX range