Bittorrent for Noobs

Ok I get a lot of requests from people wondering how to do the bittorrent stuff. So here is what ya need to know to get your torrent on.

Step 1: Get Peer Guardian 2. It is a program that runs in your system tray and it keeps a list of known IP addresses of "the man" and it blocks those IP addresses from your computer. Its not foolproof but its an extra layer of protection to help you keep from catching a court case.

Download the PG2 program from http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2. Install and accept the defaults for the most part, but you may want to check the box that automatically starts PG2 with your computer. Then you don't have to remember to start PG2 when you are downloading torrents.

An issue with PG2 is that the updating of the block lists doesn't work properly a lot of times so a bit of an adjustment needs to be made to add an extra level of protection to counter this. Once PG2 is installed and running, click on the "List Manager" button, and in the LM window click on Add. In the new window click the bubble next to "Add URL:" and in the selection box, pick the one that says http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/level1.gz. Once that's selected, hit the OK button at the bottom and now you should have a new list added. The program will now automatically download the new list and generate a new block list to use.

That's all for the PG2 setup. It should now just sit in your tray and block the bad guys.

Step 2: So now for the fun part. Installing your bittorrent client. If I was writing this a few weeks ago I would be instructing you on how to install Azureus, but lately that program has gotten a really stupid front-end to it, and become very counter-intuitive, so I've joined the masses and now use utorrent for my client. Its super simple, and works amazingly well. I wish I had switched to utorrent sooner.

So download the client from utorrent.com, and install it. Once its done there's a few settings to attend to. Let me back up first to explain one thing. The name of the game in torrent world is upload speed. Quite simply the faster you upload, the faster you download. If you are a total bittorrent beginner, the way it works is that while you are downloading your file, you are also uploading it. The faster you upload the pieces that you already have, the quicker the other peers will send you the pieces you don't have. The biggest mistake that people make is not to open up the right ports to allow you to upload at your best speed. During the setup of utorrent, its important that you get the port forwarding working properly. If you are lucky your DSL/Cable router has UPnP enabled and it will automatically do everything for you. Otherwise you have to log into your Cable/DSL modem and do the forwarding yourself. If you don't get the port forwarding correct, the program will still work, but downloads will be slow, and your seeding of the the file will be very slow.

Ok once the utorrent client is installed you are ready to start downloading. A few words at this point on being a responsible bittorrent citizen. The bittorrent system works best when people upload as much as they download. There are two modes your torrent can be in. Downloading or Seeding. Simply, when you are still downloading the file you are in downloading mode, and once you have downloaded the complete file, it will automatically switch over to seeding mode. Seeding basically means that you have the file and are uploading it to other people. You were able to download your file because other people who have downloaded it are seeding it for other people like you. The goal with any file you download is to seed it until your ratio is at a 1.0 level. This means you have uploaded enough to make up for what you have downloaded. You should always seed anything you download until you get your ratio for that file to a 1.0 level. To do otherwise is to slow everything down.

Okay that's basically it. Its a good idea to go into the preferences of uTorrent and under Directories, specify the folder you want your downloaded files to be put in.

Here are some good sites to find torrent files at:

http://mininova.org
http://thepiratebay.org

Please let me know in the comments if you have any problems.