How To Use Torrents

Updated 21. March 2013 - 0:17 by mr6n8

Introduction

This guide is to help users in getting started in bittorrent, the most popular protocol for the transfer of music, videos, ebooks, software and other content. There is a great deal of content available through torrents and this guide will help you to find and download that content.

What is Bittorrent?

Bittorrent is a decentralized peer to peer (P2P) distribution of content which uses the upload bandwidth of each individual who is downloading the content, and those who have downloaded, to transfer the content. Click on the header above for more information.

• No central server
• Content is distributed by active users
• Transferred content is an exact copy of the original
• Content associated with a torrent can not be altered
• Downloads may be stopped and re-started

Best Free Bittorrent Client

To get started in torrents, you first need to have a bittorrent client. Click on the header above for a selection of the best free bittorrent clients.

Optimizing Bittorrent Clients for Speed

After you have chosen a bittorrent client, there are a few steps to set it up properly to be able to communicate to the other active users and to get the best speeds. Click on the header above for guides for all the bittorrent clients that are (and have been) suggested here at Gizmo's Freeware.

Finding Content

There is over 20 million torrents and over 25 PetaBytes of content available through those torrents. Torrent search sites offer the best way to filter results to find the clean and real content that you want. Since the content associated with a torrent can not be altered, comments and ratings may be used to make sure that what you are getting is the quality you want.
Bittorrent is a decentralized protocol, so the content offered is not from the bittorrent clients, but from independent torrent search sites on the web. There are two pages here at Gizmo's Freeware with information on where to find the free content you are looking for.
Searching for Torrents (Best Free Torrent Search Sites)

• over 20 million torrents in their listings
• over 25 PetaBytes of content
• although there is a great deal of legal content at these sites, there is also content at these sites that is copyrighted and not legal to distribute.

Finding Legal (and Free) Torrents

• over 3 million torrents in their listings
• all the content offered at these sites is legal to distribute

Additional Help

In addition to the setup guides, above, there are other pages here at Gizmo's Freeware to help with additional features of the bittorrent clients. If there is a feature that you would like help with on a particular client, you may post here or on the help page for that client and I will try to put a guide together

µTorrent & BitTorrent Help - Contains the help articles below and support links

These two clients are identical, so the help pages will work for either.

• Installing µTorrent (or BitTorrent) Without Toolbar and Ads
• Optimizing µTorrent (or BitTorrent) For Speed
• µTorrent Help: Using µTorrent's Torrent Search
• µTorrent Help: Selecting Files To Download
• µTorrent Help: How To Hide & Lock µTorrent
• µTorrent Help: Dealing With ISP Interference
• µTorrent Help: Moving Downloads Into Category Folders
• µTorrent Help: Additional µTorrent Settings

Vuze Help - Contains the help articles below and support links

• Installing Vuze Without Toolbar
• Optimizing Vuze (formerly Azureus) for Speed
• Vuze Help: Installing The Mainline DHT Plugin
• Vuze Help: Adding Search Sites To Vuze Meta Search
• Vuze Help: Dealing with ISP Interference
• Vuze Help: Additional Vuze Settings

qBittorrent Help - Contains the help articles below and support links

• Optimizing qBittorrent For Speed
• qBittorrent Help: The Main Window
• qBittorrent Help: Using the qBittorrent Torrent Search Engine
• qBittorrent Additional Help and Information

Conclusion

Hopefully, this guide has helped in getting you started in bittorrent.
 If you have questions or corrections on any of the features listed here, please post in the comments below or at the Internet, Webware & Networking section of Gizmo's Freeware Forums.

6 Free Google Reader Alternatives

As you may have heard, Google Reader will be closing its doors on July 1st, 2013. Those of us who use and depend on RSS feeds are scrambling for alternatives. I've selected six that are web based that have (mostly) apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
The first thing you'll want to do is to download all your feeds. You can do this within Google Reader, but Google Takeout makes it much easier and you can get all your Google data at the same time.
Here's a step by step guide to downloading your Google data:
How to Download Your Data with Google Takeout
At the time of this writing bunches of people have signed up for RSS readers. Some of the sites are having a hard time keeping up with the traffic. They may not be reachable due to server overload and all features may change or not be available. I think a few more days should see things settling down quite a bit. If you find one that's down temporarily, give it some time and then check back.
Net Vibes
The granddaddy of them all, Netvibes is a combination start page and RSS reader. It’s highly customizable with a wealth of features from changing the colors and themes to a large selection of items in several categories you can add to your page. You can add pages (shown on the top of the page as tabs) for various interests. News, gardening, politics, travel, technology and more things you may want to add.
If you have a lot of feeds be aware that the amount of feeds should not exceed 150/200 feeds/widgets per private dashboard for optimum use. Directions for importing feeds can be found in the site blog. There are versions for smartphones available on iPad, iPhone and Android. It has a reader view, an offline mode.
Register for free account to use.
NewsBlur
Free account allows up to 12 sites
Supports Web, iPhone, iPad, and Android
This site has seen the most changes over the last 24 hours, from no free accounts, to limited free accounts, changing the amount of feeds with a free account, and increased the price for premium accounts. This site has seen more down time than others. Since this is a single person operation there will be a few ups and downs.
If you are having trouble accessing the main site, give this one a try.
http://dev.newsblur.com/
Free to try, free registration, free and premium accounts
Feedly
Web based, supports iPhone, iPad, and Android with addons for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Kindle.
Login to feedly using your Google account. Feedly will automatically sync your Google Reader account.
Feedly is building a clone of the Google API called Normandy. It will be in place before Google Reader and all accounts will smoothly transition at that time.
Pulse
"Pulse is a fast and beautiful way to read your favorite blogs, magazines, social networks and newspapers."
Magazine style interface.
Free registration using Facebook or Email
Direct import of RSS feeds from Google Reader
"Bringing the Fun in Reading Back. A beautifully crafted experience that puts content at its heart. Read, save & share your favorite stories."
Bloglines
(Yes, Bloglines. It's been resurrected from the old version)
Google Reader import feature
Free registration uses email address
Web and mobile versions
"Welcome to the all new Bloglines, the best resource for local blogs, news, and events."
The Old Reader
“Just like the old google reader, only better. Import your subscriptions in one click, find your Facebook friends and start sharing.”
Import your feeds directly from your Google Reader account or use our OPML import feature.
Registration requires Facebook or Google account.
No mobile as yet, but sports a mobile friendly interface.

Wi-Fi for Every Room in the Home

The Securifi Almond looks almost like an obese Windows Phone.

Wi-Fi is awesome. But when the Wi-Fi signal is weak, it’s almost worse than having no signal at all. You see signal-strength bars, but you can’t connect. Or videos play, but with a lot of pauses. Or your e-mail program tries to download messages, but just hangs there.
I’ve always wondered about Wi-Fi range extenders — little $60 to $80 routerlike boxes that are supposed to grab a weak Wi-Fi signal and amplify it. Recently, I had the perfect chance to put one to the test.
My fiancée’s San Francisco apartment is a chain of rooms off a single hallway. Living room in front, then bedroom, then dining room, then kitchen. Her Wi-Fi base station sits in the living room at the front of the house. That’s where the cable company’s jack enters the apartment.

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly

Trouble is, in this old, stately building, the walls are thick and strong. By the time the Wi-Fi signal reached her bedroom, it was too flaky to use. Now and then, she could pull up Web sites or check e-mail, but video and music were out of the question. The dining room and kitchen had no Wi-Fi signal at all. That was a disappointment for a skilled chef who likes to listen to Spotify or Pandora as she cooks.
One possibility, of course, was to see about having a second router installed. But that would mean having the cable company install another jack. It seemed as if it would be faster, less expensive and less disruptive to get a Wi-Fi range extender — if those things really worked.
On Amazon, the highest-rated extender at the time I shopped in December was the Securifi Almond. It was billed as the first touch-screen router and range extender, and had strong customer reviews.
It looks great. Some of the range extenders seem to have been designed to be as ugly as possible — they look like, well, networking equipment — but this one looks almost like an obese Windows Phone, thanks to the colorful tiles on its touch screen. It’s very small (4.5 by 4.75 by 1.5 inches).
The touch-screen breakthrough is that you don’t need to connect the Almond to a computer — or to anything but a power outlet — to set it up. We placed it in the hallway outside the bedroom door; it sits nicely and nearly invisibly on the molding above the doorway. On the screen, I tapped the name of the existing Wi-Fi network, entered its password, waited about a minute, and that was it. Suddenly there was a new Wi-Fi network in the back half of the apartment, with the suffix “Almond” on the original network’s name.
This hot spot seems just as fast and capable as the real one, in the living room. My fiancée can now stream music or video, download files, do real work, everywhere in the apartment.
On her laptop, she has to switch manually to the Almond network when she moves into those rooms; my laptop usually hops onto it automatically when it wakes up.
The fine print: The Almond is also a regular router; that is, you can plug your cable modem into it to create a Wi-Fi hot spot. We didn’t use it in that configuration. If you do, note that its Ethernet jacks are not gigabit speed.
You should also know that rival range extenders are dual-band (they offer both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands, if you know what that means), whereas the Almond is 2.4 only. Rival extenders can cost less and offer more networking features.
But they’re also uglier and far more complicated to set up. The Almond does beautifully as a simple, effortless, attractive way for non-nerds to extend their hot spots into un-blanketed corners of the house.