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About BitTorrent:

BitTorrent is the global standard for delivering high-quality files over the Internet. Since it forces the users to upload to other users while downloading, everyone helps out in distributing the files. This will quickly add up to quite enormous amounts of available bandwidth. So when normal web-servers and other file-sharing systems fill up with leachers, creating slow speeds and long queues, BitTorrent just gets faster and faster as more and more people start downloading.

Each download is broken down into small chunks. Once you have downloaded one of those chunks, it will immediately start uploading it to other people.

You may notice it starts out real slow, but after a minute or so (once you have a whole chunk to share) it starts uploading, and the speed picks up. This is because BitTorrent favours those who upload when deciding who to send to.

For this reason, BitTorrent will be very slow if you for some reason are unable to upload. This may be due to a firewall blocking the BitTorrent ports, or you may be behind a NAT / Router that doesn’t allow you to upload. A solution to this is to:

* Firewall: Open ports 6881 to 6999 to traffic.

* Router: Forward ports 6881 to 6999 to the PC running BitTorrent.

The biggest reason why people find BitTorrent slow is because they didn’t configure their firewall or router correctly. There are a few BitTorrent clients that use different ports so check for that. Transmission for Mac OS X uses port 9090. To open the ports in Mac OS X is really simple:

System Preference>Sharing>Firewall>New

Enter Other for port name. Enter 9090(or enter 6881-6999 depending on the BitTorrent client) for TCP and UDP port numbers. Enter the name of the application in description. Click OK to finish.

For windows and other firewall software read the guides.

BitTorrent Client

There are only three clients that i recommend:

* uTorrent for windows – http://www.utorrent.com/

* Azureus for mac and windows – http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

* Transmission for mac – http://transmission.m0k.org/

What you need to do:

* download a BitTorrent client.

* Install it.

* Click a .torrent link or open a .torrent file. (if your browser asks, choose ‘open’, not ‘save’)

* Choose a location on your hard-disk to save it to.

To find the torrents files you can use many torrents sites such as mininova, The Pirate Bay or meganova. But the best torrent site is ScrapeTorrent, where you can search all the most popular torrent sites at the same time. Also the filter search is good, if you are looking for a movie that is a DVD rip.

Also worth knowing:

If you want to pause the download and resume it later, just hit cancel. Later, you simply click the link again, and choose to save to the same place as before. BitTorrent will read through the partial download, and find out what chunks you are missing, then resume the download.

IMPORTANT:

When you download is finished, BitTorrent will continue to share the file with others until you close the download window. Since BitTorrent depends upon the users to share the files themselves, please keep the download window open for as long as you can after finishing. If everyone just downloads and quits immediately, the torrent will die out, and no one will be able to download it anymore. This is known as an ‘orphaned’ torrent, and is particularly annoying if you have 99% of the file, and no place to get the remaining 1%.

If you have the file, and you just want to help out serving it (a very nice thing to do), just click the .torrent link and save to wherever you have the file already. BitTorrent will see that you have the whole file, and start sending it to others.

ERRORS:

If the .torrent link is broken, the site hosting it is having problems. Try again later.

If the .torrent file opens, but it never starts downloading the file you wanted, the ‘tracker’ might be down. Trackers co-ordinates ‘who gets what from who’. The tracker servers are mostly very stable, sometimes even location servers, but they may still crash. Again, try later.

If it says a chunk failed CRC, or you see any other errors, yet it keeps downloading, just ignore them.