If you have a monthly download limit or have to share your connection with your family or roommate(s), or if your internet connection just isn’t as fast as you’d want it to be, you might want to tweak some settings in Ares Galaxy.

You don’t want to hog all the available bandwidth when you’re on a shared connection, or be downloading and/or uploading so much that you’ll be having difficulty checking your e-mail. For these, and other possible reasons, you should change the transfer and bandwidth settings of your Ares Galaxy client to make it comply with any possible external constraints put on your connection.

How Ares Galaxy works

When you download something via Ares Galaxy, whether through the Ares network or through its integrated bittorent feature, you’re using a P2P program. This means that, instead of downloading the data from some server directly, you are connected to other users, just like yourself, who are sharing identical blocks of information with one another. These blocks of information can then be put together to form music, video, documents or any other kind of file directly useable by you.

Why are we telling you this? Because it means that when you are connected to the network, and sharing data with others (and if you haven’t specifically turned it off), you will, through the act of downloading the data you want, become a peer, one of the many people whom other people can download this same data from.

This greatly speeds up the network, makes centralized servers with huge hard drive and bandwidth requirements unnecessary and multiplies the amount of available information by many factors. But, it requires bandwidth from you to become part of the network. If you are on a severely limited connection, then you should change the settings on Ares Galaxy to accommodate for these restrictions.

How to limit Ares Galaxy’s bandwidth usage

To change the transfer and bandwidth settings, go to the Control Panel, and then click on the Transfer tab. The options you’re looking for are in the middle of the screen.

On the right, you can change the Bandwidth settings. As you can see, I personally have no limit, as I’m on a limitless broadband connection myself, but if you are not, this is where you can change the maximum bandwidth usage of Ares Galaxy by entering the maximum upload and download values in kbps (kilobytes per second).

Now, if your bandwidth is limited, you won’t want to be downloading many things at the same time as it will take forever to finish them all. Rather, change the “download(s) allowed at once” to one to focus on a single download at a time.

Free Ares download

If you’re on a limited connection, and can only download/upload so much, then the free Ares download should be high on your list. You can use it to browse for and share all the information and back-ups you want, and can easily optimize its bandwidth usage to specifically suit your needs and connection constraints.