Introduction:
In this tutorial you are going to learn what is torrent and how it can be used to download files.
Step # 1 – Negative Associations
Torrents are something that have a somewhat negative reputation because of their association with file piracy. Much of the media attention is linked with this site “The Pirate Bay” which hosts many ‘torrent’ files. These are essentially small files with distribution information that allow you to use a client program (such as uTorrent) to download files. The Pirate Bay site (or any other torrent site) does not actually contain the copyrighted material, rather this is held on users computers who are sharing the files.
Step # 2 – Downloading a Torrent File
In this example we are going to focus on the legitimate side of torrenting, by visiting “www.clearbits.net” which contains some legitimate torrents that do not violate copyright laws. Here we are just going to click on an item to download from the front page, you will then be taken to a page where you can download a torrent file, click on “Torrent file” and a “.torrent” file will download to your machine.
Step # 3 – Starting a Torrent Download
To open this file and use its information to begin the download you are going to need to have a program called “uTorrent”. If you don’t have this you can visit “www.utorrent.com/downloads” and click the “Download Now” button and install the program. Here we already have it installed so we won’t do this. Instead we will simply click on the downloaded “.torrent” file and it will open in uTorrent. Click “OK” in the dialog box that appears and the file will appear in the list and start to download. That is essentially what is a torrent and how to download a torrent file to your computer.
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