the forums at degreez.net

Hi,
In case it isn't infinitely clear right off the bat, I'll say that i'm a newbie. I just found this forum and it's been so helpful so to everyone who posted thank you very much.

Based on what I've read here, I've opened ports 6881-90 and 6969 and that turned all my torrents green. So now i'm d/l at around 10-20 which is great for me since I was used to speeds of 5! But I've been reading through the forum and it seems like these speeds aren't so great and I just got a torrent that d/l at 65 so i'm not sure if i'm getting the most out of my internet connection or not. My max connection is 84kB/s, I'm on adsl, and I use Zonealarm for a firewall. I tend to run 2-4 torrents at any one time. I checked out a link to port-forwarding.com so I could try and set a stable ISP but if I do that do I lose anything safety wise? I also saw that someone recommended "make torrent" as a fix for the problem so I could do that too. Which way if either would help me or is there anything else that I should do to improve my connections? Lastly, I was reading about hackers "sniffing" for open ports. Does keeping my ports open let my computer be attacked if I keep the firewall up and if so is there anyway to prevent that (can I port-trigger without a router?). Any help would really be appreciated.
Jat