I keep hearing the word, what are they? how do they work?

Cheers,

Alan

Its file sharing.

Torrents work by downloading and uploading at the same time.

They hog a rediculous amount of bandwidth.

See here for an explanation of how they work:
http://www.bittorrent.com/introduction.html

David

Thanks....interesting....but I'm still virtually clueless......

They are basically used for the sometimes legal, and often illegal prcatice of filesharing over the internet.

You and anyother person with Bit Torrent (or any of the other torrent programs) installed on their PC can look at eachothers shared files and folders, then download from eachothers hard drives. Obviously you can share pretty much anything.

Thats about all there is to it. Its just a different way fo file sharing.

David

ah a bit like that very well known one (who's name escapes me) ...kazoo or something?

think you mean kazaa or however its spelt Alan

Ned.

Look for bittorrent or utorent or bitcomet on google. These are torrent programs then you can find torrent sites like uknova and such where the torrents are hosted. As you download your computer leeches off people downloading the same torrent as you until someone joins who has less than you and you become a seed, so you can seed others at the same time as you leech. It's a slow process though but if you leave your computer on when you are not using it and pause it when you are busy it's not too bad.

This is a Torrent over here:

Torretns have a great advantage over P2P like Limewire and Kazaa in that you can download folders of items, not just individual files.

An example of this if you're into music is with P2P you spend ages finding the tracks to make an album and download them individually, but with torrents you could download the entire back catalogue of a band or artist with every album with the correct tracks in its own folder in a single download. If that makes sense.

Have a hunt around the with Google, there are a few good guides out there.

HERE is a link to Slyck's Guide to bittorrents.

Pretty useful and the list of Websites is updated regular too.

just go to

http://www.mininova.org

search for what you want.

to get it you need a client - it will show you how to download uTorrent.

when you click on the link of the file you wanted, windows comes up with the normal 'save as' prompt. save it. it will go into uTorrent and start the download.

read uTorrents FAQ and it will tell you how it works


atb

steve

Its the biggest source of music (and porn) files on the net - I use Azeurus and often see that over a million people are on line, all sharing files.

It can be slow but more dependable than kazza ect. At least its not completely full of viruses. Took me 7 days to download the 17 episodes of the prisoner.
Dale

One of the advatages as I see it is that it breaks the file into many small sections.

Once you have downloaded that section it becomes available to others in the swarm.

In effect you can download from people who haven't even got a full copy of the file themselves which means that there's more potential download points in circulation.