My niece INSISTS that her bittorrent running 24/7 is not hogging my bandwidth (shared through router)I insist it is. Which is the case? I'm sick of paying for broadband and running at dial up speed.

Have a look at the intro to what BitTorrent is and i agree that BitTorrent is most likely hogging your bandwidth. http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduction.html From this information, it is clear that because various people are most likely downloading from your computer constantly, thus limiting the bandwidth you have remaining. My recommendation is to restrict how much your niece uses bittorrent, and see how much your connection improves without it running. If your download speeds doesn't improve, i would generally adivse against using so called 'download managers' and the like, as most of the time they do little to nothing in terms of improving connection speeds, and instead load your computer up with spyware. Although some of these utilities are actually legitimate, to find them can sometimes be quite a task. MPM8989

It is for sure that bit torrent is killing the line with the uploading. 8) Find out your REAL (not the advertised) upload + download bandwidth limit and get a software called Netlimiter (or similar soft) install it on her computer. This software let you control upload + download limit for each of software seperately. You shouldn't let the bit torrent use more than 2/3 of the upload limit.

yea, but netlimiter will only limit the upload speed on 'your' computer, not your neices.