Sunday, May 24, 2009

Making use of off-peak download cap

The Australian internet companies have two separate sets of caps for us poor souls: peak and off-peak. I am with TPG and their off-peak period is from 1am to 7am. If you are a person who values their sleep like me, there is no way that I would wake up at 1am to start off my torrent downloads. Fear not, there is a very simple solution. Just use uTorrent's scheduler.

uTorrent has an easy to use scheduler. It is available under Preferences->Scheduler. The "Enable scheduler" tick box has to be clicked to activate the scheduler. The scheduler has 7 rows, one for each day. Each day consists of 24 blocks, representing each hour of the day. In order to limit downloads in the off-peak time (ie between 1am and 7am) simply double click to turn the blocks green for each day between 1am and 7am (see screenshot). A single click will make the block pink, which is for seeding only. I value my cap, so I've limited the upload speed of my torrents (the speed at which others can download my torrents) to 1kB/s. This is set below the scheduler.

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