can anyone give me and everybody else reading some advice on how to maximise the downloading speed without screwing around with your computer too much, and without limiting the uploading capacity too much. basically, i want to know which buttons to tweak to make this baby rock! and any tips in general...
thanks in advance.

Beyond going to the tips in the User Guide, just share lots of legit content so good hosts will try to connect to you, download at peak times (watch the net size, and keep a clean connection to the gnutella net by opening the firewall and mapping your router (if any).

Download speed is determined by the slowest link between you and the file you want. All you can do is have the fastest internet you can afford and tweak the bottlenecks on your system.

thanks for the reply stief. can you be a bit clearer fo r silly old me. i was just checking my firewall prefs in system prefs and none of my options are selected (i am on an ibook) which ones do i need to check to get better/faster results? is there any inherent danger in opening up the firewall? i couldn't see any spcific info in the users forum relating to this for mac users. i appreciate your time so if you think i should be educating myself soemwhere else, like www.figureitoutyourself.com just point me in the right direction.
thanks again

You can search around--the advice on firewalls is frequent, but the decision to open up has to be yours. So far, I haven't been burned when I leave it off, but then I don't keep much of interest that isn't already shared.

The default firewall setting for LW on OSX is buried in the System Preferences->Sharing->Firewall->New->Gnutella/Limewire (6346). That's the only one you need to checkbox. If you go with a different port number, just create a new one instead.

Sure like those iBooks--coming up to our first anniversary with mine (extended warranty helps keep me happy).