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[ianfreddie07]

Can anyone give me a detailed review on why should I use torrents or not?

[The Fifth Horseman]

Pros:
1. Centralized network allows for quickly locating seeds.
2. It's really fast
3. Because of the way torrents function, fake shares are at worst uncommon.

Cons:
1. Centralized network is very vulnerable to damage to its structure (human: if a tracker goes down and it's the only one you have for the given torrent... you won't download)
2. Client program searches for seeds only on the tracker list given in the torrent file (which means that if there any seeds are connected to a different, unlisted tracker, your client won't "see" them)
3. Leeches (users who only download and remove the share as soon as they finish) can kill off a torrent quickly (this is an unfortunate consequence of the networks' fast speed)

[velik_m]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ianfreddie07 @ Aug 10 2007, 01:48 PM) [snapback]304105[/snapback]</div>

Can anyone give me a detailed review on why should I use torrents or not?
[/b]

free stuff
movies, games, pr0n

[bobson]

If I need to download something i use 3 progs:
Direct Connect (StrongDC++)
torrent (BitSpirit)
eMule (eMule)

My favourite is torrent - i get what I want and it's quite fast, especially if the downloading stuff is new. If it's old - it's slower, and sometimes it stop around 95-99%, because there are no seeds, only partials, and you can wait and wait and wait some more - then delete the files ...

DC is good for quick search - if I find a really dfast connection (2-6MB/s) I download what is interesting and turn it off (fast people are only from your town/nieghbourhood)

eMule is the slooowest - it sometimes takes days or even weeks to downlad, but there you can EVERYTHING - if you failed to download something - try eMule :P

[Mighty Midget]

Torrents or no torrents, the downside of downloading especially exe files, is that you better have a pretty good idea of what the size of that file should be. I would not download say, a 3 minutes mp3 for 250 kb, or Battlefield for 1.5 mb. That only spells trouble. The torrent files you download has info on the total size of the program you're about to download, so it shouldn't be too difficult to spot any trouble before it gets to your hdd. The downside of torrents, as bob-satan just pointed out, is that the number of seeders could be so low or zero, that it will take you forever to download a large file, if you get to complete the download at all. There should be a number both on the torrent client such as Azureus, which tells you how many complete copies there are of the downloading file. The higher, the better and below 1 means there are no complete copies around.The number of seeders will of course vary during the download, but you can get a pretty good idea from the page you get the torrent from if this particular torrent has enough seeders to be worth the effort.

Anyway, just a couple of random thoughts.

[_r.u.s.s.]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(the_fifth_horseman @ Aug 10 2007, 04:12 PM) [snapback]304107[/snapback]</div>

Pros:
1. Centralized network allows for quickly locating seeds.
...
1. Centralized network is very vulnerable to damage to its structure (human: if a tracker goes down and it's the
[/b]

actually, azureus client offers decentralised torrents

but not to mislead freddie. the "centre" is only tracker, which 'points' your computer to the torrent. and files itself are stored by all the users who download it. and its up to you to shrare it with others if you like it (or if you are a nice person..but most of "normal" people seed it at least for a while).

so the main difference between direct download (or others direct p2ps) is that in direct downloads, all the files go from one "source" so if the server or user is slow- it goes slowly. while torrent recognises that more users have the same file (its the same torrent after all..) and more users(servers) upload this to you, so if one goes down, nothing happens, many other users still have it.

[ianfreddie07]

Should have also put earlier... but what, in your opinion is the BEST torrent handler? I use uTorrent and it's ok so far.

[Morrin]

I use uTorrent as well. Nice well working software that is

[Japo]

I heard, from several people and I think some of them know their stuf, that uTorrent is the most lightweight and functional at the same time. I myselft have downloaded only once through torrent in my life so I used Opera itself.

[_r.u.s.s.]

if you are gonna use uTorrent, dont use the newest version! it has something commertial built-in and restricts speed limit
i personaly use azureus, but it requies java