Enter The Torrent World

Bittorrent. Not familliar with it ? Keep reading!

It ain’t really important to tell you who made Bittorrent, only telling you how this works.
That’s right! A step-by-step guide.
Don’t  expect any rocket science here. This is just going to be the basic and is just a beginning, so I plan to update this as I go along.

First of all I am stating that to copy films / files/ programs/ software without the owners permission is illegal!! Do not do it. Any information that follows is purely educational.
Downloading Torrents is NOT ILLEGAL as long as you are not infringing copyright.

With the advent of broadband technologies such as DSL and cable modems, the everyday user suddenly has a big chunk of bandwidth, not only for download, but also upload. Sharing files directly from your computer (without first sending them to a server) is now a reality. This is where p2p comes in. The acronym p2p stands for peer-to-peer, which basically means client to client. That is, you download files from people like you instead of from big servers, and in turn they download files from you. You share your files, your friends share their files, and everyone talks directly to each other.
The problem with most P2P networks is that many people just don’t like to share. They open up their program, download their files, then close the program before they can help anyone else. It’s called leeching. BitTorrent is a P2P file swarming application. This means that as soon as you have downloaded a few chunks of a file it will start uploading it to others, thereby spreading the file better. This makes it easier to get the file from many different people at once, thereby increasing the probably that you’ll get a good download speed. This means that the more you upload, the faster you’ll download.

Things you should know

• Leecher: That’s the guys that don’t have the complete file.
• Seeder: Those that now have the entire file, 100%, and therefore only function to upload to those      that  haven’t got the whole thing yet.
• Peers: All users connected to the same torrent. The more peers, the greater the speeds, providing there are enough seeders.
• Tracker: The centre when you start up the torrent. In short – it connects you to other users and is also the thing that sends you messages to your client.

How to do this ???

1 – Install a Bit Torrent Client

Before you start downloading games, movies etc, you’ll need to install a Bit torrent client. There a numerous clients available all with different features and options. Some people claim certain torrent clients provide faster download speeds, personally i’ve not noticed this between clients.
I would recommend using BitComet as it’s simple to use, looks nice and works well.
Other Bit Torrent clients you might want to try are:
•    The Original Bit Torrent Client
•    Utorrent
•    ABC
•    Bit tornado

2 – Download a Torrent

Ok so now you’ve got your torrent client installed, go to your favourite torrent site (e.g. http://www.isohunt.com). And search for the application you want to download and click on the link to download the Torrent file.

Here are some of the best and popular torrent sites :

Mininova.org is the successor to Supernova, one of the original biggest torrent databases of the Web and the Most visited torrent site on the internet . Almost anything you want can be found here.

Scrapetorrent.com is another torrent beta torrent site that searches many of the popular torrent sites listed here , its fast , clean (spare the pop-up) and definitely my favorite .

Demonoid The most popular private torrent site . You need to be registered and registration is by invitation only Note: User Registration is also open some times on Fridays GMT. (PS: This site is BACK , up and running )

PizzaTorrent Searches torrents in real time. A New site thats really catching popularity.

Torrentscan.com can search many torrent sites with this one. Voted as the best torrent site of the year by About.com

Torrentz.com really good site for torrents. Searches many sites for torrents. Another favorite of mine.

The Pirate Bay a very popular torrent site with a huge database. The good thing about this site is that there are lot of commenter’s that help with file installation and also warn against rip off’s .

Isohunt.com another popular site with a huge database. Still a very popular site and a favorite to many.

BTjunkie awesome site especially for games , has loads of torrents downloaded from demonoid .

Thebox a torrent site dedicated to british television.

Once you’ve clicked the link your browser will ask you whether you’d like to open the torrent or save it, If your using BitComet I’d suggest choosing “open” and then choosing BitComet as the application to open the torrent with.

Once you click ok BitComet will open up and the following dialog box will appear. You can see all the files in the torrent and also the location where these files will be saved to. The default location should be fine unless you want to save the files to a different drive, this folder can be change by clicking “browse”.

3 – Open Your Files and Share
Ok once the torrent is fully downloaded you may/should seed the torrent so others can download it. You can seed by not stopping the torrent after completion of the download. BitComet will automatically seed a torrent once it’s finished downloading. If you browse to the folder where you chose to save the files you can then use them.