How to Use BitTorrent
OiNK and Demonoid have both been shut down recently. It's a sad day for file sharing and public torrent users. If you don't already use BitTorrent as a means of file sharing I highly recommend it.
It's very early in the morning and I have plenty of better things I could be doing, like sleeping; however, I've decided to take it upon myself to write a guide to the wonderful world of torrents.
How to download things using BitTorrent:
1) Get a BitTorrent client. You'll probably want to experiment around with the client you feel comfortable with, but for Windows based platforms I'd suggest using uTorrent or Azureus [if your computer doesn't suck].
2) Find the torrents. To download torrents you need to find a place where people have uploaded torrent files using a tracker. This is usually done on some sort of forum or a service that scours and searches all available public trackers. For now you can try The Pirate Bay which is a public tracker and kind of sucks, but whatever. It's your first time and it'll probably be awkward and over really quickly anyway, right? Right.
3) Search for what you're looking for. Let's say you have horrible taste in music; just type in "Fall Out Boy" in the search box and it should come up with some results. Click on the album you're looking for, if you're using The Pirate Bay you'll probably see a bunch of ridiculous results that have nothing to do with what you're looking for, (ie: pornography). Try not to get distracted by this and click on what you're actually looking for. Here's the Fall Out Boy result for the album Infinity on High. Click on "Download This Torrent" and click choose the Open With method in Firefox. If your BitTorrent client isn't already set to handle .torrent files you're going to need to use the Browse option next to open with and select the client you've installed.
Note: if the torrent you're downloading has no seeders it will not download. The term seeders is used to describe how many peers have completely downloaded the file already and are connectible and ready to share. The example I used did not have any seeders, so naturally it will not download. It's always good practice to find a torrent with the largest amount of seeders if you want to get your data fast.
If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask. Watch out for my next segment: "Stop Typing Like a Jackass" and "12/F/TX really means 47/M/WY"
It's very early in the morning and I have plenty of better things I could be doing, like sleeping; however, I've decided to take it upon myself to write a guide to the wonderful world of torrents.
How to download things using BitTorrent:
1) Get a BitTorrent client. You'll probably want to experiment around with the client you feel comfortable with, but for Windows based platforms I'd suggest using uTorrent or Azureus [if your computer doesn't suck].
2) Find the torrents. To download torrents you need to find a place where people have uploaded torrent files using a tracker. This is usually done on some sort of forum or a service that scours and searches all available public trackers. For now you can try The Pirate Bay which is a public tracker and kind of sucks, but whatever. It's your first time and it'll probably be awkward and over really quickly anyway, right? Right.
3) Search for what you're looking for. Let's say you have horrible taste in music; just type in "Fall Out Boy" in the search box and it should come up with some results. Click on the album you're looking for, if you're using The Pirate Bay you'll probably see a bunch of ridiculous results that have nothing to do with what you're looking for, (ie: pornography). Try not to get distracted by this and click on what you're actually looking for. Here's the Fall Out Boy result for the album Infinity on High. Click on "Download This Torrent" and click choose the Open With method in Firefox. If your BitTorrent client isn't already set to handle .torrent files you're going to need to use the Browse option next to open with and select the client you've installed.
Note: if the torrent you're downloading has no seeders it will not download. The term seeders is used to describe how many peers have completely downloaded the file already and are connectible and ready to share. The example I used did not have any seeders, so naturally it will not download. It's always good practice to find a torrent with the largest amount of seeders if you want to get your data fast.
If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask. Watch out for my next segment: "Stop Typing Like a Jackass" and "12/F/TX really means 47/M/WY"