Downloading large files from the internet via torrents can be a little intimidating to an inexperienced person. I shouldn't be and this article will help you to get started. First, let me say that I do not condone, advocate, or recommend that you illegally download anything. Law enforcement is increasingly more aggressive in their investigation and prosecution of those who do.



A Torrent is a small file that tells torrent client that you have the file that the torrent is relevant to. It is in effect, a license given to the torrent client to allow it to share the file with others. For example: you write a paper called "All About Torrent Downloads". Using your torrent client, you make a torrent with the file. At this point, you are the only person with this torrent. You want to share this file with others, so you upload the torrent to any of several torrent sites (kickasstorrents.com, demonoid.ne, etc). Along comes Joe Blow who, searching through the torrent site or a search engine finds the torrent for "All About Torrent Downloads" and thinks he want to download it. He does so and when he does, his torrent client (Utorrent, etc) and begins to download the file. That's it. He now has the file. And now two people have the torrent.

Let me back up for a minute and define some of the terminology that is being used. I've talked about what a torrent is, but what is a torrent client? A torrent client is a peer to peer (P2P) program that allows computers to give access to certain files to share with each other. The files that are shared are the torrent files that have been seeded. A seed is someone who is sharing the file. In the example above, after the download has completed, the file will begin "seeding". If you let it complete the seeding process, from then on, if your computer is on, and you are connected to the internet, you are sharing that file. Remember, you do not have to let the file seed. If you do not, then you have the file you wanted, but you are not sharing it with others. One other term you will see is a leacher. A leacher is someone who is currently downloading the file.

Okay, all of that said, what do you do to start downloading? Go to Download.Com or some other download site and download Utorrent as your torrent client. Install the program. Next go to your favorite search engine and search for the file you want plus the word torrent (i.e. All About Torrent Downloads torrent). Go to one of the results Google gives you and download the torrent. When you do, Utorrent will open up and you are on your way.


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