Torrents Eplained

The world of torrents can be a wonderful way of sharing files over the internet but can also be terribly confusing at times.

Ths brief guide is has been designed to compliment my post on downloading Nintendo DS games and it is this file type that I will mention in this post, although the idea is the same for any file type.

Introduction

The basic idea behind torrents is a powerful way of sharing files with other people over the internet. The more files that are being shared the quicker the download of those files will be. It is therefore obvious that the more popular something is, the more people wll be sharing it and the quicker the download will be.

The world of torrents will open a whole new catlogue of jargon for most people so rather than explain the processes and risk confusion I'm simple going to list the steps I use one by one so it can be easily followed.

Summary

1. Download and install the uTorrent program for free.

2. Search for and download the files you want using a torrent search engine like Pirate Bay or BTJunkie.

3. Files will download and store in your downloads folder ready to either use or extract before using.

Step 1

The first things that's needed is a "torrent client". This is a program that is installed on you computer that downloads the files you want from all the other people with that file. My personal favouraite is a small little program called uTorrent, download the "Get uTorrent x.x.x stable" file from here http://www.utorrent.com/download.php for free and follow all the instructions to install it.

Step 2

You are now ready to look for your files on the internet using a torrent search engine, there are plenty of these around but I use http://thepiratebay.org/ for my Nintendo DS downloads and http://btjunkie.org/ for everything else.

Using Pirate Bay as an example, use the search box to search the file you want and then select the file from the list that is produced by clicking on it's name. On the next page will be a link inviting you to "download this torrent". Clicking this will open a "file download" box, here you want to click Open instead of save. Doing this automatically opens your newly istalled uTorrent program and will present you with a list of the files that you have just selected to download, there may be just one but in some cases (NDS games in particular) there will be many to choose from. After selecting the files you want click ok and they will load into your program and will automatically start downloading.

The files will now download and the speed of this will vary upon many many factors and will also constantly change throughout the time it takes to download. The main factor to look out for would be the number of people currently "sharing" the file, to get an idea of this, look at the number of seeds, the higher the better.

Step 3

Once the download has finished the files will be stored in the Downloads folder of your Documents. Depending on the type of file you downloaded, it will now either be ready to use or will require a bit more work first. Most files will be ready to use, e.g most music files will already be in mp3 format and will play in the normal way.

In order for downloads to be quicker, many files are compressed first to make them smaller which means you will need to "extract" them before they can be used. These file are most likely to have the extension .rar

To find out how to extract these files please see my "extracting .rar files" post.

Please be patient with your downloads as some can take a lot longer than others, trying at differen types of the day can help and try not to download too many different torrents at once.

There are plenty of guides out there to try to maximise your connection speeds if you wish to learn more about this so there is still a lot more to learn if you have the time.