How do torrents work??

I wonder whether someone would mind taking the time to explain torrents, what they are and how they work... not in a sub-micro level manner, more Torrent User 101, so I can understand how to download them, save them etc...

I'm stabbing in the dark at the moment...

zip and rar downloads

sorry... meant to be new thread...

Look for and download a program called Tomato Torrent. Then, have a look at a website such as www.torrentscan.com, type what you're looking for in the search box and choose a torrent site to search.
Once you've found something, you can download the small torrent file to the desktop and Tomato Torrent will start it up if you double click it. The file will then download.

The higher the number of seeds and peers on the website you searched in, the faster the torrent will download.

Keep it legal mind ;-)

Thanks for that...

will give it a try...

do programmes like Limewire work the same way?

A good guide to the basics of torrents is here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent.htm

It's different to LimeWire (which uses the Gnutella network) because with limewire you find a host who has the whole file, and download the whole thing from that one host. With bittorrent, you download from several different hosts all at once, each providing a little bit. The net effect is that it makes far more efficient use of the network bandwidth.

If you skip past the first paragraph you will find this article interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

in general..

Using Torrents | The Online World

will give you a good start on the topic.. make sure you read it through

r we even allowed to talk about torrents here?
last mac forum i spoke about torrents on i was banned...

I think it's a mather of giving out information were to find Torrents to download. If you just more or less just said "torrent" and got kicked, thats just weird that they do that

Try transmission, really easy torrent client, works perfect =)

Talk of downloading illegal stuff is not allowed here and could definitely lead to getting banned.

A torrent client itself is not illegal. There are many legal things that use torrents for their downloads. Ex. many Linux distro's.

The management is pretty good here at watching the line. If a thread begins to approach that line, it will be deleted.

Torrent 101

The bit torrent protocol is used to download things from the web in a very simple and efficient way.

How the system works is that a seeder creates and uploads a .torrent file to a website. In the creation of this torrent file, the actual file to be uploaded is logically split into many different smaller files (this is necessary for the protocol to work). The actual .torrent file is basically a set of instructions including where to download the file from as well as the "map" of the small pieces of the file.

Once this torrent file is created and uploaded by the seeder a leecher may download the torrent file and open it with a torrent program such as Tomato Torrent or Transmission. This program will read the "map" and begin to download portions of the file directly from the seeders computer. As another leecher joins the swarm he begins to download parts of the file as well. These parts are usually different from the ones you are downloading.

The reason for this is because download speeds on each persons individual connection are usually much higher than upload speeds. For example:

Leecher A can download at 700kb/s
but
Seeder A can only upload at 300kb/s
therefore
Leecher A can only download at 300kb/s

When we add more peers it looks more like this:

Leecher A can download at 700kb/s
but
Seeder A can only upload at 300kb/s
so
Leecher B joins in and Seeder A's bandwidth is split to 150kb/s for each leecher

Leecher A and B are downloading different parts of the file and once they each have enough parts they will begin to seed to each other using their own upload bandwidth.

This enables a leecher to download small parts of the file from many peers at once to utilize all of his download bandwidth.

These swarms can grow to huge sizes with many peers so that everyone can download at maximum speed.

It is common courtesy to upload at least as much as you download just so everyone has a chance to get the file.

Now also keep in mind while there are many legal and great ways to use torrents there are also many illegal things available through the torrent protocol such as music, movies, software, and many other things. Of course those are illegal and will not be discussed here. I am including for the sole purpose to warn you just because it is available does not mean it is legal. So
Be careful of what you download as there may be legal ramifications

Torrent files can be acquired at many different sites but a few of my favorites are listed below (keep in mind these sites contain legal and illegal files to download so again be careful):

The Pirate Bay
Demonoid.com - This is a private tracker you will need to be invited by a current member to get full access

Good luck to you! And remember keep it legal.