Torrents: Using Free Online Resources To Safely Download Anything

If you don't know how to use torrents by now, you should. It is the safer way to download free files online, compared to P2P clients like Limewire or KaZaa. It does take a little longer to learn how to use torrents however, and this is what I'm here for.

The first thing you need to do is get a torrent client (a program to download torrents). One of the best clients is uTorrent - simply do a Google Search on it and it will be the first on the list. Download the client. I recommend uTorrent against others such as BitComet because uTorrent is a light piece of software, runs very quickly without taking much resources (memory, processing power) from your computer. You want this.

The second step is to get some form of protection. Once again, Google "PeerGuardian" and download this software from the first search result you see. PeerGuardian is a relatively lightweight piece of software that denies the access of unwanted/strange IP addresses from contacting your computer. You want this because government/school IP address may invade your computer and catch you uploading files. So, consider PeerGuardian or another program, ProtoWall (the former is better) as condoms for the web.

The third step is to find which torrent website you would like to download torrents from. One of the safer and most extensive torrent sites is www.Isohunt.com. Of course, you get your run of the mill suggestive ads and whatnot, but I find Isohunt.com to be less intrusive and more straightforward than other open torrent sites. An even cleaner looking site is www.torrentz.com.

Now, running PeerGuardian and all at this point may make you feel somewhat invincible. But the above two torrent sites are open sites with public trackers, meaning that your downloading and uploading activities are more prone to Big Brother. What I suggest is hopping on-board to private trackers.

Private Trackers are secure torrent websites that require registration. Take at look at this link: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/05/bittorrent-sites-open-for-signup-15.html. It's an article on the top private trackers that may still have free sign-ups. The easiest way to get registration into a private tracker is to get in touch with a techie/geekie friend who downloads and have him/her send an invitation to you. Using PeerGuardian along with a Private Trackers is not 100% foolproof, but it's way safer than downloading something straight from Limewire or Kazaa, or even a public torrent tracker.

After you get to the downloading stage, what you want to do next is to limit your uploads (read: don't upload). I know this goes against the online free file sharing community, but if you want to be safe, then don't "seed" torrents, which means to leave them on, uploading your file for other torrent users to download. On uTorrent, this means that you would right click on your 100% done download, then click "remove torrent." Note that your file is still there, and this is different from clicking on "remove torrent + data".

Note that using this method, you can download anything from under the sun, including anime, music, movies, software (Windows 7, Photoshop, Quickbooks, you name it!), software for the Mac, and even pretty good ebooks. There are torrent sites that fill almost every niche; some are dedicated to just anime, some are dedicated to Computer Games, etc. I have a friend who downloads PS2 game files, transfers them to his Playstation 2 Hard Drive, and they play just fine. The things that people can get away with these days...

Torrents are especially helpful if you like to download things in complete "sets". For example, downloading whole music albums, as compared to downloading song-by-song. An alternative to using torrents is the direct-download site, such as www.dilandau.com. Direct downloads from a website is, IMO a lot safer than downloading from any client, because there is no risk of uploading/sharing your files this way.

Another point on staying safe in the fun world of downloading:

What you download increases the risk of getting caught. Example: downloading one of the screeners for a new movie, say, Transformers 2, is a lot riskier than downloading non-American (or generally, non-native) media, such as Asian cinema and anime. Also, downloading ebooks and software is safer than downloading films and movies. I have no proof for that, but it's just what I feel. If anything, stay safe and don't upload.

Some last technical pointers on making the most out of your torrent/downloading experience:

Many torrent files, for the sake of saving space, increasing safety for media pirates, and/or packaging many files into one, pack their files into what is called a .RAR file. You will see this quite often on torrent sites, and .RAR files are almost guaranteed when you want to download software. To "unpackage" these .RAR files, you will need to get a program called Winrar. What you need to do is to download a free copy of Winrar from your torrent, but make sure that the file extension ends in .EXE (which is likely), meaning it's a readily executable file that you don't need to unpack. After installing Winrar, make sure you go to the options and click on "associate with the above files (.rar, etc)" and click on "integrate into shell" if that's not checked off already.

Then, right click on a .RAR file you want to unpack. Go to the newly-added option that says "extract here." All files in the .RAR file will be extracted into whatever folder you downloaded the file into. After this unpacking, you may want to delete the original .RAR file since it is now obsolete (you have unpacked the files you need) and to save space.

It will take some time to digest if you're not tech-savvy, but once you get the hang of downloading in this manner, you will wonder why you've never downloaded like this before. It's safe and will save you thousands if dollars. I am incredulous at people who still pay too much for software like anti-virus and Windows Vista and Photoshop and Dreamweaver and...you get the point. Read this guide carefully, and pretty soon, downloading this way could literally improve your life and safety.