Active connections and sync-ing my wallet issues I have been trying to sync my wallet with the network for around 3 months, and it is still only at 45.29%. Any ideas?

I am using Bitcoin Core version v0.15.0.1 (64-bit). I have UPnP enabled, I am also port forwarding on 8333. The machine is a macbook pro running sierra 10.12.1. The wallet is on an external HDD.

I can not get more that 7 active connections to the network. Most of the time I only have 1. 

I would have give up on this if I hadn't accidentally sent bitcoins that I have mined to this address already, before the sync completed. ( I had no idea I would have these problems, I have, in the past, sync'd with no problems, using the same machine, same internet provider).

Any ideas on how I retrieve my lost coin, or make the sync process possible? I've exhausted the few ideas I had.

Thanks.
Pete
I just synced Bitcoin Core from scratch in about three hours yesterday on my home computer. The active connection count is not likely to be the bottleneck, it's usually rather the Disk R/W or the verification work done on the CPU. External drives exacerbate the Disk R/W delay significantly. If you have a few GB on your main drive, you could try to run a pruned node on your main hard drive, that would at least mitigate some of the Disk R/W delays, especially if your drive is an SSD. Another thing that can speed the process up significantly is to give your Bitcoin Core more RAM.