Mysterious download surges during torrenting

My system:
Compaq Presario 2500
704 MB RAM
27.9 GB HD (823 MB free)
XP
µTorrent
Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB USB-HD
10.0 Mbit/s

The mystery:
Every minute there's this huge-ass surge in download speed. While the average download speed is some 250-300 kB/s, the surges could be as high as 6000 kB/s. Is there a bottleneck in my system (as the USB connection to the HD) or does µTorrent work in that way?

Please help me solve this mystery, beacuse my client is clearly under-achieving.

magic

Your ISP, your router, your NIC or your network stack. One or more of those is/are probably shitty. Crappy routers often can't even handle p2p on 1-2 MBit lines properly, much less 10 MBit, so it's probably worth a try to replace yours with a good one. Either build your own or buy a decent one.

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Is your internet connection fiber, cable or DSL based?

>>5
Windows-based.

>>6
GTFO

Its probably your ISP being shit.

It is obviously the l337 h@XX0RZ entering your system, delete system32

i agree with >>4