A Brief Guide to Using Bittorrent

Bittorrents are a new form of file sharing that enable fast downloads of nearly any album, movie, or other form of file through the use of a Bittorrent client. It's a peer to peer type of downloading, meaning that a file is hosted by several users. When a download begins, the Bittorrent client pulls sections of the file from the users to form a complete file.

Bittorrents allow for fast downloading without a central server, and they're a really great way to host and download files. If you're thinking about getting into torrent downloading, here's what you need to do to started.

It should be noted that downloading copyrighted material through a torrent file is still illegal, and may carry harsh local penalties.

1. Find a Bittorrent client. The classic client is the program Bittorrent, available at bittorrent.com, but there are many different bittorrent clients that each have their own perks; some manage great amounts of files more efficiently, for instance, or have more user friendly interfaces. My favorite bittorrent client is Azureus, available at the link at the end of this article, which lets you accurately watch all of your downloads and your share ratio (which I'll get to later).

2. Find a torrent file. These can be found pretty much all over the Internet, but some of the most popular sites include Torrent Spy and Torrent Scan, which allow you to search through a large listing of the available torrents people have created on the Internet. Look for files with lots of "seeders", which are people that are offering the file up for download.

3. Download the file and open it in your bittorrent client. Your client will start pulling fragments of the file from users who are logged on and allowing the torrent file to be shared and compiling them.

4. Depending on the popularity of the file and its size, it may take a while to download. Once the file's done, you can open it and enjoy, but leave your client connected; this will allow other downloaders to get parts of the file from you. Many bittorrent sites require that its users share a certain percentage of each file they download, usually from 30% to 100%.