Winxp Pro firewall

Hi. I recently got a new computer with winxp OS. My old comp was 98 second edition. It works fine with the bittorrent program and the dl speed was always around 100kb or at least 50 kb.

This new comp is well...a bit slow. The max I've hit was 20 kbs. The real problem is, whenever I turned off the xp firewall, the comp would restart automatically. Then, if I tried using the internet, it would keep on restarting.

I don't know if this is natural with winxp or not since I've only start using it. I asked some of my friends and they said its not a problem for any of them.

By the way, my internet connection is cable if that would help any of you to help me. Thanks. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-happy.gif[/img]

I'm not sure, but somehow I doubt it is the firewall, as if it was, it would either deny the BT connection all together, or let it pass through and perform like normal. Makre sure that the only that changed between your old and new machine is the operating system. Who knows what could be affecting your download rate. A good way to narrow down the possibilities is to download a file via http and if that max's out much higher than your BT download, then you know it's an issue either with BT client or your ports that it goes through.

Well, the http is definitely higher than the bittorrent dl. But the real problem with the firewall is that everytime I turned it off (to get better bittorrent dl rate), it automatically restart my computer.

Well, what you can do is to port forward your XP Firewall. If you look at the guide here, then you should be fine. I would suggest just port forwarding ports 6881-6889 (or whatever range you use for your client) because you have to port forward one by one and it would take forever to port forward all the port (6881-6999). Hope I could help.

the "automatically restarting computer" thing sounds like you're getting hit with one of the numerous virii out there that cause things to crash. Before you try touching your firewall again, you should DEFINITELY do two things:
(1) Make sure you have all your windowsupdates installed (you should probably be using automatic updates, for that matter).
(2) Get some good antivirus software, and set it up to automatically update as well. Do a full system scan with it with the latest updates installed.

I've been amazed how many computers these days come without service packs and critical updates installed. At work we just got a batch of laptops that were nearly 30 critical patches behind, making them vulnerable to auto-rooting viruses like nachi and sasser (in fact, one of them came with both nachi and sasser on it, beautifully enough).

Also, rather than entirely disabling your firewall (which you shouldn't consider doing), you should probably do what stos said, and just open the ports up on the firewall for bittorrent. Incidentally, I'd recommend using nonstandard ports (like say 8250-8270 instead of 6881-6889).