Torrent Tutorial
Alright I guess it’s about time I wrote this, people have been asking for ages. This tutorial is to show you how to download a Torrent Client, torrents, and ultimately end up with the file(s) that you want. For example, a few people wanted Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on DVD but didn’t feel like waiting until Dec. 5th or whenever it is coming out, so I searched for the torrent downloaded it, let the torrent do its thing by downloading the file for me and a few hours later I was burning a DVD quality movie. It is not complicated and takes little time. If you’re more tech savvy and want a detailed description of what a torrent is and how the file distribution, trackers, and seeders work you can visit visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent they explain it pretty well. Okay so let’s get down to the tutorial.
First thing is first you’re going to need is a Torrent client to make use of your torrents you will be downloading in a moment. The one that started it all was BitTorrent. After that a huge amount of clients sprung up, some good some bad so I’m going to show you some of my favorites. µTorrent: (http://www.utorrent.com/download.php): This one is my favorites I’ve been using it for maybe 2 years now. It has great speeds and its tiny doesn’t take up much space, has its own downloads folder. It works great with easy functionality and simple user interface. I recommend it for first time users only because it’s so simple it’s basically point and click with this one. Advantages: µTorrent gives you charts that show which pieces of a torrent
you've already downloaded and which ones are on their way to you right now. It also shows you which pieces are most common, least common, and unavailable among the current set of peers. (5/5)
BitTorrent (Bittorrent.com): The BitTorrent official client, developed and released by the company of the same name, is written in python. This client is good because it’s
official although it is very basic, it doesn’t have many of the advanced features that the other clients have. But all in all I didn’t have any problems with it while I was using it. (5/5)
Azureus (Azureus.sourceforge.net): I put this one up here because I’ve found that a lot of people use this, but it’s actually not very good, and they get turned off from using torrents from a bad experience with one client. So you can give it a try if it works for you then that’s great but if not give those other two a try. Why isn’t Azureus that good? Well first of all it’s coded in Java if that doesn’t mean anything to you then basically when you’re downloading load is heavy then this program turns into a resource hog and things end up running really slow. But that is just my opinion.
Now after you have your client what do you do? Well you look for the best torrents you can find. Torrents are very small files that contain information for the client to find and download whatever you requested. So basically what you’re doing is going to a website, finding a file that you want (example: Jay-Z’s new album) downloading the torrent that has the file information and opening it in your torrent client. It’s as simple as that. What are some good torrent sites? Well you’ll learn from trial and error because some sites can be good one day and then unreliable the next. So you can go to www.google.com and type in for example, “Rock and Roll torrent” it’ll return a list with all the sites that have rock and roll torrents and you can take your pick. Here is a list of some sites that are quite reliable. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. www.mininova.org www.boxtorrents.com www.torrentspy.com www.isohunt.com www.torrentbox.com www.torrentportal.com
Those are just a few that work well. There are thousands out there that might have what some others don’t. After you download the torrent all you have to do is open it in your new favorite torrent client and wait for it to download. Some take longer than others so just be patient. If it doesn’t work then try downloading other torrent file and see if that works. It can get frustrating sometimes when it doesn’t work. Just be patient. You can’t argue with being able to download full DVD quality movies, hundreds of albums, and the latest software when it’s fast, easy, and 100% free.
So good luck and I hope this tutorial helped you. If you have any questions or comments about this tutorial feel free to stop by the site and email me. I’m open to any suggestions.
;========================== ; Author: Justin Cancino ; Date: November 29th, 2006 ; Version: 1.0 (under revision) ; Contact: www.lookitsjustin.com ;==========================