Anyone else download with Bit Torrent?

[JakeLeg]

just came across this download - a bunch of garden books in pdf format. kinda big at about 282Mb, but i'm downloading.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/685769

[conundrum]

I looked at Bit Torrent...seems a bit glitzy and flashy, and after trying to download it was told that I needed to go to the OFFICIAL site(o...kay???)to get set up. Mulled this tidbit over for a moment and decided I really did not need the service, have survived quite nicely without it.
I suppose this reflects age, but a lot of things that are available just seem more confusing than they are worth. If it helps you that is great. Enjoy it. c.

[JakeLeg]

not sure what the "official site" you mentioned means, since there are dozens of clients (softwares) that use the bit torrent protocol.

i prefer u-torrent, which is a free (free of charge, free of spam and spyware) download.

i like the bit torrent protocol/network basically for 2 main reasons:

Search: on a network like kazaa, limewire, emule, etc, you search through the client. with a torrent type software, you search over the web. I can (and often do) have 10 or 12 or more tabs open in firefox all searching various torrent sites at the same time. many of the bit torrent search sites allow users to leave comments on a particular file, and i've often disregarded files after seeing things like "this is a virus", or "files are corrupted", "doesn't download properly", etc.

Compiling of files: what i didn't like about a network like kazaa was that you had to download each file individually. the example i gave above is probably 50 or more PDF files. If i wanted to download all of them, i'd have to have 50 different downloads happening, and since most warez only let you download a certain number at a time, it would be queued up forever with dozens of downloads. with the torrent software, all of the files (the 50+ above pdfs as an example) are packed into one torrent, thus one download. now, going back to kazaa, it IS possible to put all the files into one ZIP or RAR file, limiting you to a single download, BUT, the downside to that is that you are now stuck downloading all of the packed files whether you want them or not. with a torrent software, you can choose to download all files, or any combination of therein of your choosing, while still just queueing one download.

Napster, Kazaa and Limewire were okay, but they started getting really slow and picked pretty clean once people started moving over to the bit torrent protocol. I waited a while to switch to bit torrent until i couldn't stand kazaa anymore, and haven't looked back since.

[swedishfish]

utorrent is now cross platform and has a clean interface.

[FZRaven]

just came across this download - a bunch of garden books in pdf format. kinda big at about 282Mb, but i'm downloading.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/685769


Yep, use it all the time for downloading software. I used to use Utorrent until I switched full time to linux, now I use deluge.