I'm currently using uTorrent. The problem I have with it is it causes my computer to randomly freeze for several seconds (the cursor moves but everything else including any music/video playing stops. This means I can't download and do other things (which this computer should easily be able to do). When I leave it going over night it doesn't seem to stop it downloading stuff though.

Having trawled through the uTorrent help files I seem to be getting symptoms like these (I'm not running any anti-virus applications) I also have a Nvidia motherboard which has known problems, but not like I'm experiencing. I tried installing new drivers but they didn't make a difference, I also can't find any sign of this firewall anywhere. Does anybody have any ideas as to how I could solve this problem?

Or any suggestions on a good alternative torrent program, there seem to be a lot of alternatives and I'm not sure which ones I should try.

Every time I start uTorrent I get the nVidia firewall warning as well.... but so far I have yet to have any major problems, must be lucky I guess
As for the firewall, I tried 'moving' the *.dll they refer to, but after that Windoze wouldn't even boot.. had to into it through safe mode and put that file back

If you ever find a way to disable that firewall, let me know!

Erm.. Perhaps my issue isn't the firewall then because I don't get any warning messages and have never found any sign of it (despite trying to find it to disable/uninstall it to see if it causing my problem).

afaik the way to disable the direwall is by uninstalling the driver for it via add/remove programs... the nvidia drivers should be in there... make sure not to uninstall all other drivers as well
best way to get rid of them though is to not install them in the first palce

Quote from Shotglass :

...direwall...

I have no idea if that was intentional or a typo but it got me

Azureus has always worked well for me. And with the Speed Scheduler plugin I can stay within my ISPs Fair Usage Policy automatically

Been using uTorrent for ages now, never had a problem (currently using 1.6 still). The only time I get any pauses in system responsiveness is when a download completes and starts seeding.

I used Azureus before that but it's way too bloated for my liking (and Java apps are just crap in regards to speed / resource hogging IMO).

My windoze install was in dire need of reinstalling too so it wouldn't have been doing any apps any favours really, but no problems to report.

It sounds like there's something else amiss rather than utorrent itself, although what, I couldn't say.



Regards,

Ian

I'd have to agree, utorrent is a top notch BT client, I have never experianced any issues with it.

As Ian says, it sounds like something else is amiss, rather than the problem with utorrent itself, as utorrent is such a small, self contained program, I think it's unlikely it could be causing as issue.

I concur entirely with Ian and Dan... been using uTorrent for who knows how long, and it's very, very good

Another happy uTorrent user here.

uTorrent FTW.

Tristy, you can schedule uTorrent too, go into Preferences and Scheduler. It should be sufficient, and uses a lot less resources than a Java application. Now if they'd get an OSX version I'd be happy.

Hmmm, if I hadn't used Azureus for 4+ years then I'd think about changing. But as I only download torrents when I'm asleep then resource hogging isn't an issue
I think I did try uTorrent all that time ago, and didn't like it at the time. But it's probably very different now.

I'll stick with what I know.

Quote from Shotglass :

afaik the way to disable the direwall is by uninstalling the driver for it via add/remove programs... the nvidia drivers should be in there... make sure not to uninstall all other drivers as well
best way to get rid of them though is to not install them in the first palce

I've only got NVIDIA Drivers (GPU + Mobo I guess) and NVIDIA Photoshop Plug-Ins (dds converter) in my Add/Remove programs so I guess I don't have the firewall installed. I know I certainly would opt out of it if I spotted it whilst installing but TBH I can't remember.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Azureus has always worked well for me. And with the Speed Scheduler plugin I can stay within my ISPs Fair Usage Policy automatically

I use Azureus on my Mac and never realised it was multi-platform :doh:

Will do fine for my needs.

Quote from danowat :

I'd have to agree, utorrent is a top notch BT client, I have never experianced any issues with it.

As Ian says, it sounds like something else is amiss, rather than the problem with utorrent itself, as utorrent is such a small, self contained program, I think it's unlikely it could be causing as issue.

Yep uTorrent works fine on my other (much older) computers so I have no idea what it's up to on this one, although bizarrely I've never seen any of this behaviour at any other time so it must be doing something unusual to trigger it.

Quote from ajp71 :

I've only got NVIDIA Drivers (GPU + Mobo I guess) and NVIDIA Photoshop Plug-Ins (dds converter) in my Add/Remove programs so I guess I don't have the firewall installed. I know I certainly would opt out of it if I spotted it whilst installing but TBH I can't remember.

yes and the firewall is part of the nvidia drivers package... if you dont manually deselect it during the chiptset driver install youll end up with it

so unless youre 100% sure you did not install it click on the nvidia drivers and look at the uninstall options if the firewall is among them

Tried the new Azerus. It's got really bloated, which I don't really like but can live with if it works. I'm getting similar, but less frequent and much less severe lock ups using it. I can now actually use the task manager and continue browsing with Firefox whilst it happens, but music stops in both iTunes and Winamp and VLC doesn't like it. The task manager shows little CPU usage in these lock ups (0-5%) but high memory usage (approx 1GB - 50%).

On the plus side the HD videos from its browser thing seem to download very quickly

Quote from Shotglass :

yes and the firewall is part of the nvidia drivers package... if you dont manually deselect it during the chiptset driver install youll end up with it

so unless youre 100% sure you did not install it click on the nvidia drivers and look at the uninstall options if the firewall is among them

I have the option of:
NVIDIA display driver
NVIDIA Ethernet driver components
NVIDIA nForce PCI system management driver

I'm not sure if the firewall would be listed here or do I need to uninstall then reinstall the nForce driver? In fact what is the point in a motherboard driver? Does it do anything useful or can I just get rid of it?

whoops according to google i was wrong and the firewall isnt listed under nvidia drivers but as its own entry calles "network access manager" or something to that effect

and yes chipset drivers do something useful in telling windows how to handle all the data flow through the chipset... without them your system should slow down quite a bit

..another uTorrent user here, and my god its so much better than that resource hogging bloatware Azureus. uT is currently using 4mb of ram, Az used up to 500mb shocking.
Never once had a problem with uTorrent, you wouldn't know its running in the background at all tbh.

Azureus would also often completely lock my system up, requiring a hard reboot. Never again!

It could be the NIC. Try a different one if you have one laying around. A dodgy NIC caused a ton of problems for me on my old computer when I ran file sharing programs. Those programs create WAY more connections than simple web browsing and the NIC freaked out and crashed unless the program had a way to limit the # of connections it made.

Quote from Stregone :

It could be the NIC. Try a different one if you have one laying around. A dodgy NIC caused a ton of problems for me on my old computer when I ran file sharing programs. Those programs create WAY more connections than simple web browsing and the NIC freaked out and crashed unless the program had a way to limit the # of connections it made.

Asus mobo + nVidia chipset + two port LAN + Vista + uTorrent.
As has been previously stated here, cant find any option to either disable or uninstall the firewall part of the drivers, and although I get the warning when I start uTorrent, never have any probs with it.
uTorrent DOES have the option to limit the connections, both upstream and downstream, as well as adjusting the download/upload speeds.
_IF_ you are that way inclined there are a bucketload of options in the advanced tab to play with, but unless you know what you are doing, they are best left alone.

@Ian...IIRC you mostly use XP or *Nix...I think this is (mainly) a Vista problem

thanks for this topic i've recently been having the freezing issue described in post one and it does seem to be avast causing it. Strange thing is its only happened in the last week or so and i've been running utorrent and avast for months.

Quote from Stregone :

It could be the NIC. Try a different one if you have one laying around. A dodgy NIC caused a ton of problems for me on my old computer when I ran file sharing programs. Those programs create WAY more connections than simple web browsing and the NIC freaked out and crashed unless the program had a way to limit the # of connections it made.

Silly question but whats a NIC?

Network
Interface
Card

AKA Network Card.

Somethings up with µTorrent and some windows interface. Since one of the recent 1.7 releases of µTorrent I get a largely unresponsive system when I run µTorrent and Opera with flash-plugins on websites for a prolonged time, despite RAM and CPU usage being 1-digit numbers. That means the CPU idles at 3% while I get choppy video-playback. Without the combination of the two running the system works perfectly.
If µTorrent hadn't worked flawlessly for years before that and wasn't exactly what I want in a torrent-client I'd immediately have switched. Now I'm holding out until I can think of a solution, which I hope will come in the form of a "A new version is available"-message from µTorrent or Opera.

Vain

I've got a Netgear WG311 adapter, don't know if that means anything. Download/upload speeds are only a tiny fraction of what they are when I download/upload conventionally. I don't know if they're the influencing factor here though.