Mine Darke and Twisted Life

Viren Joky's

BitTorrent for Dummies

 

Okay, you've heard a lot about this torrent thing; supposedly the next great thing in file sharing <read pirating>. But, you have no idea of how to go about accessing it's power. In other words the last word of the title describes you to a T. Hey, if the shoe fits... 

Well here's my simple 5 step guide to getting on the torrent bandwagon and achieving download nirvana. Okay, so it may not be 5 steps. At this point I'm not sure of the number of steps it'll take.

 

How to read this guide -

 Step to be followed  My recommendations  The mechanics behind it (Don't read this if you don't want to)  Links to resources  Warning!  And this one because it just looks cool!

Here we go -

 Download a BitTorent Client

     I personally use BitComet, but that's probably not the best client. uTorrent is supposed to be good, and it's really light on resources (I'm trying it out now), or try Azureus for a full featured download.

      Here's a list of torrent clients

 Install it. No explanations here.

     You might want to allow it to associate with your .torrent (the BitTorrent format) files automatically.

     You may want to configure the upload and download speeds here. Okay, this is gunna be a bit technical. Torrents are based on sharing. That means every time you are downloading a file, your torrent client automatically starts to upload that part of the file you have downloaded. You can change or reduce the upload speed in your preferences. Why not reduce your upload speed to zero, you ask me? Well, besides the fact that its good to contribute to the pool of uploaders, torrent clients are built in such a way that restricts your download speed based on your upload speed. So why not make your upload speed max? Because that will seep your bandwidth! A comfortable middle ground should be reached.

 Now go on-line and search for a good torrent site.

     I like Torrentz.com which index a huge list of sites. Best of all, it doesn't index porn. Okay, so that's a huge negative, but you can use Pornorip or Torrentspy to look for that

     List of popular torrents sites.

 Use the search facility to locate what you want - just type in some keywords.

     For example - this is what you get if you search for 'Year of the dog' on Mininova -

     As you can see, a list of torrents are displayed here. Make sure its what you want before downloading, or Year of the Dog may just turn out to be an extreme bestiality vid. Uh, unless that's what you're looking for. Hey, I'm not here to judge. It's just that you're a filthy pervert. That's all I'm saying. And it's not often I get a change to call somebody else this.

 Okay, so you can see several matching torrents. Which one do you pick? Simple answer - the one with the most seeders (or Seeds, or S, or even health).

     Like I said above, every person downloading a file is also uploading it to some extent. And some people are just uploading it out of the goodness of their hearts. All the people who are uploading the file are called seeders. Anyhoo, the more people uploading, the more likely is it for you to get a faster download, and the less likely it is for your file to stop in between. Usually at 99% which proves Murphy's law and provoke me to extreme violence.

     Also, you may want to choose the link which has the least downloaders or Leechers. Obviously, the less people who are hogging up the bandwidth of the seeders, the more bandwidth is there for you to hog. On the other hand, the more people that leeching the file, the more likely is it to be the genuine article.

 Click on the download torrent link. You will be asked to save/open the file, which will have the ext .torrent. If you've associated your torrent client with this type of file, you can open it directly. Or you can save the torrent onto your hard disk (it's a small file; just a few kb). And then open it with your client of choice.

     Actually the .torrent file is just a link to the tracker, which keeps information of the people who are uploading the file. The client uses this information to connect to them and establish P2P connections to get the files.

 

And that's it. You're done and well on your way to accumulating masses of porn.. er legitimate files. Now may be a good time to buy that external 1 Tb hdd you were thinking about.

-Viren