BitTorrent networking is the latest form of Internet P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. BitTorrent sharing is the most popular means by which web users trade software, music, movies, and digital books across the Internet. BitTorrents are very unpopular with the MPAA, the RIAA, and other copyright authorities, but are much beloved by millions of college and university students around the planet.
BitTorrents (a term synonymous with "torrents") work by downloading small bits of files from many different web sources at the same time. Torrent downloading is extremely easy to use, and outside of a few torrent search providers, torrents themselves are free of user fees.
The fantastic thing about torrents is that they screen out dummy and corrupt files, so are free of adware/spyware, and achieve amazing download speeds.Unlike most P2P networks, BitTorrent stands out for 3 major reasons:
1. Torrents enforce 99% quality control by filtering out corrupted and dummy files, ensuring that downloads contain only what they claim to contain.
2. BitTorrent can achieve download speeds over 1.5 megabits per second.
3. BitTorrent code is open-source, advertising-free, and adware/spyware-free. This means that no single person profits from BitTorrent's success.
A BitTorrent client is a piece of software that handles the whole process of downloading files, so you don’t need to be technical, you just load it up and let it go
There are lots of different ones out there, but this is the one that we recommend:
BitComet• Download it at www.BitComet.com
• Platforms: Windows only
Advantages: Exceedingly small memory usage means that you can run a lot of traffic through the client and not bog down your machine. BitComet is a lightweight application and runs using a tiny amount of system resources. BitComet also has a clean, professional-looking interface that's intuitive and offers detailed stats. Also, BitComet does away with resume scans. The client stores the status of each torrent in an XML file. So, when you fire up an incomplete torrent, it accesses the XML file rather than scanning the entire torrented fileset to see what's missing.
Coolest feature: Intelligent disk caching is an advanced feature that users on the fattest of fat pipes will find useful. When you're transferring data at rates of 1MB per second (which is totally possible with BitTorrent), your hard disk is going to have problems keeping up. Most drives simply can't write that fast, and drives that can are put under stress while doing so. BitComet caches the data, giving your hard disk time to catch up and improving read/write performance.
Disadvantages: Windows only. The minimum system requirements are 128MB of RAM and a 266MHz Pentium. Run it on the box you bought at Fry's in 1997!