Legal Notice and Disclaimer: This guide does not contain any unlawful information of or pertaining to illegal activities and is for informational purposes only.

You’re a user of the Internet. You browse the world wide web frequently and connect to Web 2.0 websites such as Myspace and Facebook. You receive hundreds of email each day into your inbox from friends and associates. You hear everywhere people talking about how they downloaded the latest CD of their favorite band or that single-player game they couldn’t afford. You even read about sites such as The Pirate Bay that get charges filed against them for operating a network to distribute potentially illegal files. Peer-to-peer is everywhere in your life, but you don’t have a single idea on how to get started. You’re clueless.

So you turn to your best friend on the web - Khell. You greet him and then plead that he introduce you to the world of file-sharing. Wish granted.

Getting started with P2P is a daunting task. The most vast network and easily the most popular today is BitTorrent. BitTorrent isn’t actually a network but a protocol and is what we will instruct you upon today.

BitTorrent works by having you download a small .torrent file from a website and then having you execute that file through a torrent program. This program then reads the information stored in the file and then connects to a specified tracker. A tracker is a server that keeps a track of all the seeders and leechers of a file and how to connect to them. It feeds all this information to you throughout the time the torrent remains active allowing you to continually connect to others wishing to download or upload the same file.

What is a seeder?

Seeders are people who have a complete version of the file you wish to download. When you finish downloading a file through BitTorrent, you automatically become a seeder unless you specify otherwise.

What is a leecher?

A leecher is anyone that does not have a complete copy of the file and is actively working to download it completely.

Alright, that’s the background information covered. Now let’s get you started.

Firstly, you have to download a torrent application that will allow you to execute the would-be torrent files. There are numerous BitTorrent applications that exist however we recommend you to download some of the more popular ones as it has been reported that some trackers seem to block certain ones from accessing their content.

utorrentdemo.pngKhellMirror recommends µTorrent. µTorrent is a free, lightweight BitTorrent application which uses very little memory unlike other torrent applications which are somewhat memory intensive. Keep in mind, however, that although it was originally developed by an independent developer, µTorrent is now maintained by BitTorrent Inc, a company founded by the mastermind behind the entire BitTorrent protocol.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed µTorrent and then made sure you’ve configured it properly you’ll want to find a torrent site or search engine. As a beginner to BitTorrent, we recommend you visit sites such as Mininova or The Pirate Bay.

Once there you can use their search tools to browse for a file you’re interested in downloading. Simply click on them and there will be a link on the torrent’s file page to download the small torrent file we mentioned earlier. When on TPB you will need to click on ‘Diese Torrent Datei herunterladen’ which quite simply means ‘Download torrent’ in Swedish. TPB, while being hosted in Sweden, has many English users and is very easy to browse despite a lot of the navigation being predominately in Swedish.

When you have your torrent file downloaded, navigate to it and double-click on it like you would any other file. This should open up your torrent application. If not, right-click on your file and select Open With (assuming you use Windows) and then click on your torrent application in the window that will appear. If it is not there, hit browse and navigate to where you installed it. The default path is in C:\Program Files\torrentapplicationyouchose\torrentapplicationyouchose.exe.

When your torrent application launches and depending on which torrent application you chose to install, a pop-up window may appear asking you where to save the file to be downloaded. Simply navigate to where you wish to save it and hit OK!

That’s all you need to know to get started. In part two we will cover the way people label their torrent files and the mysterious file extensions they choose to share them in. We will show you how to identify and open these file formats using the appropriate programs. Stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog by registering so you can keep up-to-date with our updates!

If you liked reading this article, don’t forget to Digg it or submit it to any other social bookmarking site below. We appreciate comments as well!


del.icio.us Digg Facebook reddit SlashDot StumbleUpon Technorati