taking ages to download ds games

First things first, no ISP in the UK guarantees 8mbit speeds, because there are too many factors affecting actual speeds. you will have 'up to 8mbit' which means the theoretical maximum speed you can have is 8mbit, actual maximum speed is more like 7mbit under perfect conditions. Secondly, I am assuming your connection is cable, since that is what virgin media offer (NTL was bought out by virgin). Cable is a shared pipe, meaning everyone else with cable on your street is sharing the same bandwidth, if they are doing heavy downloading, then your speeds will drop. Thirdly, please post the following information:

a speed test performed at www.speedtest.net. Try not to use your connection while it is being performed, and at the end you will be given a link to post.

a traceroute to our server, you can get this by performing the following steps:

go to the start menu, click 'run'. In the box that comes up, type 'cmd' (without quotes) and press enter
in the window that pops up, type 'tracert us2.romulation.net > c:\tracert.txt' (again without quotes) and press enter.
when it has finished (the command line prompt will reappear) go to my computer, then double click on C:
find the file called 'tracert.txt' (you may not be able to see the .txt bit, but it will be a notepad file) and open it
copy the contents into a post in this thread.