I've been using Bittorrent to download various shows, and was never very impressed with its speed; I have a 4mb cable connection, but I was still only getting 4-5k speeds most of the time.
Recently I thought I'd try a different program, and discovered that most of them wanted access to the controls of the hardware firewall in my router, and the documentation said that they'd be much slower without it.
So I eventually installed
uTorrent which has some very good reviews and is by far the smallest of the bittorrent programs, and enabled UPnP compatibility of the router and its firewall. What this essentially means is that uTorrent can take control of the firewall, which speeds up file transfer immensely - I'm typically seeing 50k downloads now, a tenfold speed increase.
What I'm wondering about is the downside (apart from all other internet access being slow because file transfers hog the bandwidth) - does this increase the vulnerability of my network? They say not, but I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who knows this stuff.
