Bittorrent guide for beginners

Lets get into bittorents, cause its the easiest thing to setup.

All you do is install the bittorent client (see link above). go to
CODE
http://suprnova.org
and click on a torrent you like. I recommend that you right click and save the torrent. and then click on the saved torrent to start a download. this way if your download fails, u can resume it from the torrent you saved rather then having to go to the website. Confusing? it may be, thats why I recommend you go here for more helpful info.
CODE
http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/


The next thing that you need to note is, thats if you are using firewalls etc... you will need to free up some TCP ports. That is from 6881 to 6999. Otherwise the program will show you a yellow dot and your downloads will be slow.!!!

Now for all of you with limited connections, even though the faster you share the file you are downloading the faster you will download it at, IS TRUE. If you saturate your uplink, aside form making your internet connection crawl slower then a constipated snail, you will also slow down your bittorrent download as your pc will not be able to acknowledge the packets which you receive fast enough, since you are using all your uplink to share. In this case the *WISE* thing to do is to click on the torrent window and select Settings for [Dial up/ISDN] and move the arrow on the right of this all the way down to 3k for uploads.

I would also like to point out that with bittorrents, unlike other p2p sharing programs, you only share the file which you are downloading and NO other files on your pc. Torrents work by downloading bits of the file like a puzzle from various people. So if you have a part of the puzzle that someone else wants, you swap and so on.

(IMPORTANT often a torrent may appear to be completed on your hard disk (take up 500 megs as u expected) but it won't really be because torrents often reserve space and then this space gets filled up with the missing bits of the puzzle. PLEASE remember that a torrent is not finished downloading until it says "Download Finished"

It is also generally considered polite to leave the torrent open even after you have finished your download so that other people can download for you. If you don't wanna, then at least do it at times when there are 0 hosts and a few peers, that way you keep the torrent alive. (a host is a person or persons who have posted the torrent or left their finished file for sharing and peers are people who are downloading the file i.e. the host has the entire file and peers are ppl who don't and are downloading it)

FINALLY you should be able to find lots of handy stuff on suprnova but before you click to download a file, check that it has AT LEAST 1 SEED or if it has 0 seeds that it has quiet a few peers. The reason being that it is possible that all those people combined among themselves will not have enough data to put together the entier thing you are downloading (you will know that this is the case if after a while you still have a blue dot) Sometimes i have left these files going for a day or 2 and someone has kindly come in and shared their file again, and I managed to finish these downloads, so don't give up on these files straight away.

I know i have written a fair bit here, but you can probably ignore most of it heheh
Happy Torrennting!!