Webupon

We’ve hit a point in our online lives where so much content is available out there if you know how and where to look for it. You can find all kinds of information on the internet these days that most research is solely done online now. Torrents are a good way to get a massive amount of content delivered to you at a (frequently) high speed. You probably have heard of torrents by now, especially with all the Pirate Bay nonsense that has been going on. Broken down, a torrent file, on its own is essentially useless. The actual torrent file itself merely points your computers torrent client (I recommend uTorrent or Azerus) to other torrent users on the web who have the same files that you are looking for. When you load a torrent into your torrent client, it will scan the “trackers” included in the torrent file for any “seeds” or “peers” that are connected and have the torrent you are looking for. A tracker is a web server that acts as a central meeting point for P2P users. A seeder is a P2P user that has already downloaded the entire torrent and is sharing it with other users. A peer, or leecher is someone who does not yet have the full file downloaded, and is leeching off of the seeds they have connected to in order to obtain the rest of the files. A quick recap:

Torrent – a small file to direct the download of larger or multiple files

Client – a program used to read the information in torrent files, and to download their contents

Seed(er) – a P2P user who is sharing the completed torrent file

Peer(Leech) – a P2P user who is downloading the torrent file, but does not have the full torrent yet

P2P – Peer to Peer (most file sharing technologies are P2P these days, it allows faster downloads)

Alright, now that you are up to speed on the basic lingo, how about we delve a little further now? Depending on what Operating System you use, you will might need to change a couple of the basics here, but torrent downloading is all the same, it is mostly your choice in client and security software. I am writing this for the oh-so common Windows user. I can write a follow-up for Linux users if this recieves the feedback looking for it. I won’t do a Mac tutorial, since I don’t use Mac. Sorry guys, your on your own. First and foremost, before you even obtain your first Torrent Client, you will need to make sure you are safe. You are going to want to have anti-virus, anti-spyware, and a firewall installed. If you do not already have these, or are unsure, check out my article on installing a security suite

Once you have your security up to snuff, it is time to find yourself a client with which to download those torrents you want so much. As I already said, I recommend uTorrent, since it is a full-featured, lightweight client. If you don’t understand what I mean, try out uTorrent and then try out BitLord. uTorrent hardly uses any resources at all compared to that behemoth. Once you have your client downloaded and installed, you will want to find yourself a torrent to try it out with, right? If you head on over to the Ubuntu website, you can download the torrent version of their excellent OS. I’m sure you have experienced the brutal pain that is downloading a 700 mB+ file off a website. It takes forever, right? You fire the same thing into a torrent client, and you are no longer limited by the speed of the web server. You are now limited by the speed of your internet connection, your ISP (they like to cap torrent speeds), and the speed of your seeders/leechers’ internet connections. So if you go ahead and download the torrent, we can get started. ***Please note that I the file I have instructed you to download is approximately 700 mB. DO NOT blame me if you go over your bandwidth limit at any given time by using torrents. It is very easy to do if you don’t pay attention, and I accept NO responsibilty if you have issues with your ISP or the authorities*** Legal garbage out of the way, it is seriously easy to “break the bandwidth” using torrents.

People become addicted to the speed and wealth of information available to them, and they forget that they only pay for so much internet usage a month. If you don’t want to try something like a new Operating System, you could check out a site like Legal Torrents, a well known provider of freely licensed content. The golden rule to remember when downloading torrents is something you might have just noticed in the weblink I just put in. Legal torrents. Many of the torrents out there are things that are not legally allowed to be freely shared: pirated software, movies, music, ebooks, anything you can think of. While this may increase the availibilty of things, and reduce your need to pay for the latest and greatest programs or movies, there is also a reasonable chance that you could get into legal troubles for downloading such things. For example, if you decided to download the newest computer games, so you could save yourself $60 and a trip to the store, you could find an e-mail sitting in your inbox threating you with legal action if you don’t stop the download immediately. Hard working people have put many hours and dollars into making the things they have as good as they are. When you try and rip them off, they will probably take offense to it, which could lead you to a hefty fine, jailtime, or both. So just be nice about what you download, and remember that anything you do download goes through your ISP and they can see everything you do online. You aren’t being sneaky by running it in the middle of the night either, they log actions on their servers so that if the police do subpeona them to proivde your address because you downloaded the new Fast and the Furious movie, they’ll do it. And then you get to explain to the officers why you are a pirate. Good luck with that one. Just keep your nose clean and you won’t have any problems.

Anyways, now that I’ve gotten all that out of me, you can go ahead and grab yourself a torrent file, it doesn’t matter what it is, just as long as it says <filename-here>.torrent. That “.torrent” extension is what tells uTorrent that is is a torrent file, and how to use it. When you download your torrent, you will probably get an option to load it straight into your client, if you do, go ahead. If not, then you will have to manually start uTorrent and then open the torrent file from whichever location on your computer you have saved it to. Just pick uTorrent out of your Start Menu and then go to the Open Torrent dialog. Once the torrent has been loaded, it will start up automatically, finding as many people as it possibly can to connect to that have the files you want, and then downloading whatever pieces it can get from them. Torrent clients don’t care how many pieces or how spread out the files come in, they will assemble the completed files on their own. Congratulations, you are now downloading your first torrent! You can sit and watch it for a while if you want, but I’d recommend doing something else well it does it’s magic. The nature of torrents means that if nobody who has your files is online *right now* then you will not be getting any download speed at all. Also, if you cannot seem to ever connect to anyone, even if the torrent seems to have a good “health” (high seeder/leecher count), then there is a chance your firewall is blocking uTorrent. You will have to consult the manual for you firewall program, or google around on the net to see how to get through. If you still aren’t getting good speeds, then you might want to check out my article on Port Forwarding. Happy downloading!