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WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

There’s a new way to distribute files on the Internet called Bittorrent. This isn’t a description of the technology involved (see here if you want that) but suffice to say the way it works is that the more people download a file, the faster it is for everyone else to download it! It’s a great way of distributing large files such as TV Documentaries, etc.

The guide below demonstrates how to get going using a Bittorrent client called utorrent. This one doesn’t need to be installed and doesn’t have too much of an impact on system resources (unlike Azureus, the other popular client…)

1. Visit utorrent.com…

2. Click on the Download tab…

3. Click on the linked file and download it…

4. You don’t have to install utorrent, so keep it somewhere handy (I keep it on the desktop)

5. Double-click on the utorrent icon to open it and you should be presented with a window that looks not unlike the one below (except yours won’t have any files uploading!)

6. Now you need something to download! Find yourself a torrent file (see end of this article for sites) and download it. The torrent file is a very small file that tells your Bittorrent client where the larger files that you’d like to download are located.

7. Save it with a sensible name somewhere you’ll remember it. (you could simply open the file and it will be automatically imported into utorrent. Trouble is, if something goes wrong, you’ll have to remember where to get the torrent file again!)

8. In utorrent, click on File / Add Torrent…

…and then browse to where you saved your torrent file. Open it.

 10. Your torrent should now be added to the queue. Utorrent will attempt to connect to the ‘tracker’ (the computer that co-ordinates everybody’s downloads and uploads) and your download should begin. One thing to remember is that, with Bittorrent, the faster you upload the faster your download will be. It’s a very fair system!

11. You could stop there. But I’m sure you want a bit more control over your Internet connection and downloads than that! Click on Options / Preferences…

12. …and then on ‘Folder Options’. Tick all of the boxes and fill in the relevant details (you can click on the ‘…’ box to browse to a directory). Basically, you are telling utorrent to do some things automatically for you. If you have all the boxes you can specify that if you put a torrent file in a particular directory (’torrent files’) it will automatically be added to utorrent and downloaded into another particular directory (’incoming files’). Once it has finished downloading, it is then moved to another folder (’completed’). As you can see, I have these three folders as sub-directories of my overall ‘Torrent’ directory. It’s up to you how you want to configure it, however…

13. Clicking on ‘Network Options’ gives you options like the ones below. Ignore the ‘port’ settings for the moment, apart from making sure ‘Enable UPnP port mapping’ is enabled if you’re running Windows XP. Most broadband users have an upstream capability of 256Kbps. I’m not going to go into technicalities, but basically its best if you put your ‘Global maximum upload rate’ to be around 20kb/ps. (there’s a different between a kilobyte and kilobit - lets not get into that now…) You can actually set your upload rate too high for your connection which will result in slower downloads.

So now you know how to download via Bittorrent, you’ll want some place to download from. Try these for size:

• UKNova (you need to become a member and they limit membership - but keep checking back)
• MVgroup 
• Torrent Searcher 

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