Beginner’s Guide For Using Torrents – Noob’s Guide

Torrents are becoming popular day by day. From sharing files to illegal downloading, torrents are being used everywhere. This being said, there are still many computer users who have not heard of torrents or have never used them. Downloading files from torrents becomes easy once you know its whereabouts and source from where you can get reliable torrents (will be explained later in the post).

Basic Terms

BitTorrent – It is a peer-to-peer (commonly knows as p2p) file sharing protocol used for sharing data. For eg, utorrent, azureus, etc.

Torrent – A torrent file contains metadata which is used by BitTorrent client. It also contains details about the URLs of multiple trackers and all pieces.

Seeds & Leeches – In simple and layman language seeds or seeders are the up-loaders i.e those who have completed downloading the file and are now uploading them and leeches or leechers are the ones downloading the file. And Peers includes both seeds and leeches.

Getting Started

Now that you are aware of basic terms. The next step is to get a decent BitTorrent client in order to download torrents. There are numerous BitTorrent clients available and each one of them offers something different. The most popular amongst them is uTorrent. It is widely used by torrent downloaders across the globe, It is very light on resources and therefore is the first preference. Visit the uTorrent homepage to get a client for yourself.

Searching For Torrents

After you have downloaded and installed the uTorrent, the next step is to locate a healthy torrent for downloading. Note that the reason for me highlighting the word “healthy” is that a healthy torrents will let you download the torrent at maximum available speed. Healthy means that a torrents has more seeds in comparison to leeches i.e Seeds > Leeches and a higher number of peers. For eg. A torrent with 1500 seeds and 600 leeches will let you download the files at the maximum speed whereas in case there are 600 seeds and 1500 leeches, you wont be able to download files quickly.

Downloading Files

• After searching for a healthy torrent, you need to download the torrent and save it somewhere.
• Now just double click the downloaded torrent file and it will automatically open the BitTorrent client showing you the various files available for downloading.
• Select the files you want to download and click on OK.

Thats it! The files will start to download and the progress will be shown.

Reliable Torrent Sites

As i mentioned earlier torrent community is used both for downloading illegal as well as for general file sharing purposes. Therefore there are various sites offering download of torrents however very few of them provide “healthy” torrents. I am listing down some sites that i personally have been using (and still do) to download quality torrent files.

IsoHunt

PirateBay

Mininova (Contains copyrighted material)

Demonoid (Requires registration)

Desitorrents (Requires registration – One of the best to download Hindi Movies/Music)

I hope you find this article to be useful. In case you face any difficulty in using BitTorrent and/or downloading files using torrents then do contact me via the comment form given below. I will be happy to help you!