For some reason I seem to crash frequently when downloading using bit torrent possibly because I have an old PC running Windows 98se. What happens is the PC suddenly resets and starts booting up. This only happens when I use bit torrent (using ABC now).

The biggest problem is when this happens the torrent does not restart from where it left off but starts over again no matter how much had been completed. If I look at the folder for the download I see the files structures set up but the files all or most have 0 as the size (smaller ones like art etc may be there).

If during the course of downloading I pause the torrent the file sizes will then jump up reflecting what has been downloaded. When I do this then resume the torrent it picks up just fine. However when I try to pause a torrent it also sometimes causes the PC to reset so I am risking the loss of what has been downloaded to do that.

Any suggestions?

Azureus will resume tranfer on restart, planned or otherwise.

ABC should also.

My Advice: Save your money and buy a new PC....It's time.

Regardless of the client it will only restart if the downloaded data is actually in the folder. I don't know how BT is supposed to work but is obvious that what is happening for me is the downloaded data is going into some Temp folder or storage or the like and being moved to the download folder when the torrent is finished or paused. So when the PC crashes that doesn't happen and I have to start over. If I pause a torrent and don't crash then I can plainly see the size of the files in the download folder before and after the pause and that is what happens. Unfortunately sometimes pausing causes the crash so I can't just pause regularly to get something finished. Makes it especially impossible to do dvds as I usually can't download long enough toget 2-4 gig without crashing.

Probably right. Unfortunately that will probably be Thanksgiving.

on my old computer that wasn't awesome like my new one is, i found that reducing my max # of uploads reduced the number of bit torrent crashes by quite a lot. Like, to no crashes ever.
So, you may want to give that a whirl as well.

I'm only doing 1 at a time already. It seems to be worse doing DVD's seemingly due to the large individual files sizes. I'm sitting at 40% of a 2.6g Nirvana Live & Loud DVD that I have already downloaded over 4g on due to crashes. Ouch. Theres a good way to burn up your user cp ratio.

At the Sidewalk Crusaders forums got the advice that this is often related to network adapter cards. On the other hand the one I have seems to be the one others who had problems switched to and the only other ones I've seen in stores were the ones they had problems with.

maybe i didn't explain well. when you're using bit torrent, your computer is trying to both send and receive data at the same time. My computer crashed a lot because it was trying to send/receive more than it could handle - so the way you fix this is reduce your max upload speed/amount (which in turn reduces your max d/l speed).

torrents won't go as quickly but you may not crash as much.

I was using ABC instead of Azeurus as I had heard Azeurus was more of a resource hog and figured my PC couldn't handle it. Figuring I had nothing to lose now I switched anyway and Azureus is working great and takes a lot less CPU and I am having no crashes. Problem solved.

As a warning to anyone thinking of using ABC 3.0 I tried that also and could not make it work without manually saving the torrent files and dragging them to the ABC window. Just clicking the link would leave an ABC task running and never finishing to try to start ABC or add the torrent to it. Could not go back to2.6.9 without the same problem even after uninstalling and running a registry cleaner. Found out that someone else I know had the same problem with it under XP (I'm win98se).