Cable companies report that 55% of traffic in the US is due to torrents. What is a torrent? Well it is a peer to peer network which can deliver insanely fast download speeds at no cost for the hoster! It also puts a nice cloak on whoever put the file out there, which means you can get almost any song or software. Including the new Windows Vista for free!

To get started you will need to get a torrent client here are my recomendations per OS, if you want one client to handle any OS you can get Azureus but it can be a memory hog and slow down your machine.

• Windows: utorrent, it is free small and very memory efficient meaning it won’t slow your computer down.
• Linux: rtorrent, like utorrent but for linux.
• Mac OS X: you can get rtorrent if your brave, or Transmission if you like a gui.

Now after you installed it you can go to a torrent tracker and search for you want such as Torrentz.com or ThePirateBay.org.

How to improve your speeds!

• Set up port forwarding or DMZ for the computer running the torrent, you should look in your torrents preferences for the port range. Their are no ports dedicated for torrents anymore due to ISP’s putting restrictions on those ports.
• Put a cap on your upload speed, I suggest capping it to 20kbps but you can always look at what the max seems to be and dividing it by 2.
• If you are on windows xp sp2, chances are it is only going to allow 10 connections which will kill your download speed, use this program(mirror) to change that number, any number between 50 and 100 should be fine.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 9:49 AM and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.