A SIMPLE AND COMPLETE TUTORIAL ABOUT TORRENTS FOR NEWBIES

Here is the complete tutorial of what is torrent, where do we get these torrents, how to download a torrent, available torrent clients, how to add a torrent to a torrent client for downloading the content in the torrent after the torrent is downloaded, torrent terminology, selection of torrents, healthy torrents and many more…

1) What is a torrent?

• Torrent is a small file (around few kilobytes) with the suffix .torrent, which contains all the information needed to download a file the torrent was made for. That means it contains file names, their sizes, where to download from and so on.
• Torrent is the most popular way of downloading large files, including movies and games (subjected to legality of downloading).
• Downloading with a torrent is advantageous especially when downloading files, which are momentarily very popular and which lots of people are downloading. Because the more people download the file, the higher speed for everyone.

2) Where do we get these torrents?

You can get torrents for almost anything on lots of web sites and torrent search engines.

3) How to download a torrent?

Downloading a torrent is no way different from downloading any ordinary file from net. Directly point to the torrent and click on it. A box should appear showing 3 options as below:-

Select the first option to directly open the torrent with desired application i.e., a torrent client. Second application allows you to save the torrent file and add to the torrent client when desired. Third option is used by selecting any of the above two options and checking (marking) the third option to perform the same task when ever you download a torrent from any site with out intimating you.

As said the suffix of any torrent file should be “.torrent” (shown in red color in above figure) or else the torrent may be corrupted or the torrent doesn’t have valid extension. In both the cases, the torrent cannot be downloaded.

4) Available Torrent clients

A torrent client is a mediator/software used to download the content in a torrent. Many torrent clients are readily available in net and they can be downloaded directly from their home page.

Most commonly used torrent clients are:-

· uTorrent

This is the most commonly used torrent client as it is well known for its light weight (hardly 200KB), simplicity and reliability

Visit the official website of uTorrent: http://www.utorrent.com/

Anyone can freely download the full version with out any restriction directly from the home URL of the site mentioned above.

· Azureus

Another very favourite client, written in Java (you need to have Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed to run this application).

JRE can be downloaded freely from here... click here

Azureus is highly customizable, while it has no complicated controls. This application is an open-source.

Visit the official website of Azureus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Anyone can freely download the full version with out any restriction directly from the home URL of the site mentioned above.

5) Adding a torrent to a torrent client

Before downloading the torrent, be sure that you install any one torrent client in your PC. Once you download the torrent and double click on it or you select the torrent to open directly, the following box appears.

The box shows the files that are in the torrent. You can check on the files that you are interested and keep the other ones unchecked so they don’t download. Now select the location where to save the torrent by clicking on “…” (Shown with red color in the above figure). After marking the desired files to download and selecting the download location, click on “OK” to start the download.

6) Torrent Terminology

· Seed is the user, who has the file completely downloaded and is sharing it.

· Peer is every downloading user, who doesn't have the file complete. After finishing the

download, a peer becomes a seed.

· Leech is practically the same as peer, sometimes it is a label for a peer with a very low UD ratio.

· UD ratio is a rate between received and sent amount of data. It is modest to keep this at least on the value 1 (share the same amount you download)

· Tracker is a server, that co-ordinates downloading of all users.

7) Selection of torrents and healthy torrents.

Torrents are largely dependent on the number of seeders seeding the torrent and number of leechers downloading the same torrent.

For example, when a new movie or music album is released in any torrent, the download speed increases proportionately to the number of users downloading the same file and that is the biggest advantage of torrents.

So, a torrent should be selected in such a way it has more number of seeders than leechers.

For example,

• A torrent having 20 seeds and 12 leechers will give you an excellent download speed.
• A torrent with 20 seeds and 40+ leechers reduces the download speed and increases the upload speed.

A healthy torrent is one which has double number of seeders than leechers i.e., a torrent having 20 seeders and 10 leechers is said to be a healthy torrent and always downloading a healthy torrent gives best possible speeds.

8) Legality of downloading with torrents

As with any downloading technology, you should not download copyrighted materials such as software, mp3, movies and so on. If you do not have the licence for it, it is illegal.Of course, torrents themselves and all around them is nothing illegal, until you download materials you shouldn't. Torrents are also used for fully legal distribution of certain data ( for example demo versions, trials and so on).