Sharing files has become a common practice in todays computer society. Peer to peer programs such as Limewire and kazaa are great for newcomers to the game of p2p, but what if you want to share a file that is much larger? Such as a movie that is 4 gigabytes? Do you really want to use MSN to share that? Well, a great way to do this is using what is called a torrent client. There are several programs to use for downloading torrent files. There are 2 main ones that people typically use. One is Utorrent, which is good if your processor is under 1 ghz. The other one, that I use, is called Azureus, which is made for more hefty computers. This tutorial will show you how to use Azureus. I include download links to everything that you will need to become a torrent expert!
First, get the old version of azureus, the one without vuze content (1). It will update after you install it, probably quite a bit too. After this installs, go ahead and quickly run through the wizard. It should put you through a quick speed test, and figure out what your top download and upload speed is. Download speed should be high enough that it won't really ever reach that. Upload speed is all that really matters, because when you get it up to about as high as you can, then your computer will basically load web pages for like 10 minutes per page.
terminology. When you go to a public torrent site, for this tutorial I am going to use the pirate bay, you need to search for a torrent that you want. When you specifically are searching for a torrent, you need to look at the numbers of seeders, and the number of leechers. Seeders is the number of people who have completely finished downloading a torrent, and are now uploading it. Leechers are people who are still downloading. A good torrent should have a ratio of seeders to leechers of 1.5:1 or so. Click the link for the torrent, and download it. Select open the file with and chooseNow that you have azureus installed and you know your speed limit, you need to know the azureus. Azureus will prompt you on what files you want to download. Most of the time, you just click OK, but sometimes, say you only want one song off of an album, you can uncheck all the songs you don't want, and check the ones you do. The file then gets added onto the leech area (figure 1.1, blue area), and will download. Under the column of seeds (figure 1.2) , you can see the number of people who are seeding. The number that is outside of the parentheses is the number of seeders you are connected with. The number in the parentheses is the number of seeders in the "swarm" (swarm is the number of people that are possible to connect to). So for instance, if you have 1(3) that means you are connected to 1 seeder, and they are uploading to you, and there are 3 possible people that you can connect to. In the column of Peers, the number outside of the parentheses is how many people you are connected to, and you are uploading and downloading from. The more peers, the faster your download will go, but it also slows it down because the seeders have to also upload to them. For example, if you have 1 seeder uploading at 100kbs to you and 2 other people (3 total) then each one is getting about 33kbs download speed, but each peer also uploads at 20kbs each. Meaning, you get about 75 kbs total. Anyways, after a file is completely done downloading, it will go to the bottom area, the seeding area. While it is down in this area, you want to look at your share ratio. When your share ratio reaches 1.000 it means that you have uploaded as much as you have downloaded. On a public torrent site, it is polite to let it reach about 1.500. When you become a member of a private server, most people just let it run its course, meaning about 1 week of uploading. The highest share ratio I have ever gotten was like uploading for a month, and it was about 15.300 or so. Now that your file has downloaded, by default the file will go to my documents: azureus downloads. After you feel you have finished uploading enough, right click the torrent file in azureus and select remove. This will not delete your file, just the torrent.
That concludes the basic use for azureus. Later, I will teach you how to use other functions, such as creating your own torrents.
Figures:
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
LINKS:
for old version of Azureus
http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=84122&use_mirror=internap&filename=Azureus_2.5.0.4a_Win32.setup.exe&90877345
For a good public site:
http://www.thepiratebay.org
-Zaphod
