How to Download Torrent Files

Here's an article that will enable you to use a bittorrent client to download torrent files.

Bittorrent is an excellent way to quickly download movies, albums, games, music videos, programs or eBooks. Pretty much anything that can be downloaded off the internet can be found on torrent sites, and although the legal side of this is bleak in some countries bittorrent is fast, simple and very accessible.

First of all you need to have a client. A client is a program that will let you download the file you want. As you use the client it connects you to peers all over the world, and you download the parts of the file from an available peer. As you download, you also upload the parts that you have already got to other people, and this is excellent in the way that no one can block their sharing before the file is already downloaded.

The client you must download from the internet, and then install its software. Most clients have an easy installation that finds the best performance options for your computer and bandwidth. I would recommend utorrent, because it takes up the least memory on your computer. This program can download the files you want in the background without lagging your computer in any way. Other programs that are good are bitcomet and azureus, and while these clients have more options and fancy interfaces they take up more memory. The speed will be about the same in all three, as it depends on your bandwidth more than on the different clients.

So you have the client installed, and ready to go. The next thing to do is to find the file you wish do download. There are multiple torrent sites out there, and although several have been closed to the U.S. public in the last year, an example is www.torrentspy.com; there are many others readily available.

www.thepiratebay.org is a Swedish run site that has huge amounts of torrents. They have a search function, and also a browse function for you to find exactly what you are looking for. If you find multiple copies of the file you want look through the comments to see what people think of the file. Also look at how many leechers and seeders there are.

Leechers are people who are still downloading the file, i.e. they don't have the complete version. Seeders have downloaded the whole file but keep uploading it to others so they too can get to 100%. The more seeders the better, so if in doubt between two torrents pick the one with most leechers/seeders. Sometimes there's also a bar called "health" and this indicates how available the torrent is.

Now you just download the torrent to your computer and open it with the client of your choice. Let it get some time to get started, and you'll notice the speed increasing as time goes by.

When the file is done open it up with the appropriate program. Remember that some movies require specific codecs in order to play. VLC or GOMPlayer are excellent media players, and is far better than windows media player. If you have trouble locating the downloaded file, either right click and choose "open location", or go into options to find out where the client downloads to.