Tips to be considered while you use torrents
Post date: 19-May-2011 14:09:30
Seeders (Seeds) [Upload]: Are people who have a complete copy of the torrent's files and are only uploading (sending) data to the people who are downloading (receiving).
Leechers (Peers) [Download]: Are people who are currently downloading the file. Leechers can become seeders after downloading the full file.
Keep your virus protection program up to date. There are free anti-virus programs, top-of-the-line, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG and Avast. If you do happen to get a virus, remove it (see Remove a Virus).
A practical tip is to stick with downloading torrents that have a large user base. This means download only those torrents that many people have downloaded and uploaded, or that have been active for a long time. The logic here is that nobody will seed a torrent that has a virus in it and therefore the torrent won't be very popular and won't be seeded. Be wary of the week old torrent with one or two people seeding it.
There are other torrent clients (programs) that can be used so do your research on these also. The most popular torrent programs are uTorrent, Azureus and BitTorrent. use uTorrent because they port forward for you now, useful if you have a home network,
There are Torrent search engines that search the popular torrent clients (programs). This saves you time by not having to search each individual torrent client site.
When looking for torrent files, prefer ones with plenty of Seeders so that the file downloads quickly. When searching for torrents, you can often sort the results by seeds, simply by clicking on the seeds column header.
You can set the options in your web browser to download to a specific folder and then, using the options in your torrent client, enable torrents to be automatically loaded from that same folder you have chosen. This way, the torrents will automatically load for you with minimal effort. It's possible that a torrent client does not have the auto-load option, I know that uTorrent does have this ability in Preferences.
You can leave the torrent program running overnight to download while you're away from the computer, or close it and turn off the computer to save power. Most torrent programs will have an option in Preferences to start up with your computer and this option can be enabled/disabled by opening "Run..." from the Start Menu and typing in "msconfig". Most torrent programs will resume the download process automatically when you start them back up. If the download doesn't resume automatically, there should be an option to start downloading, by either right clicking on the file and choose "Start" or a button somewhere in the program.