Torrent! what is a torrent download? how does it work?

cold_heat · 10-28-2009, 04:02 AM

I tried for a torrent download. It gave me a file of less than 50 kb. The actual size of the file is more than 2 GB. can anyone please explain all this to me. can you give step by step procedure to follow so I may not harm my computer and get the download easily.? thanks...

John K · 11-02-2009, 04:07 AM

A torrent download is a peer-to-peer download. The actual file you want to download is at multiple locations across several personal computers. These information is kept in a torrent file (the one you just downloaded) hosted on a server.

After you've downloaded the torrent file, you need a peer-to-peer client such as uTorrent, bitTorrent, Azureus, etc in order to download the actual file. Basically, after installing the peer-to-peer client, you just double click on the torrent file and everything will work out from there.

Note:
The download speed varies depending on the number of seeds available. Seeds means the number of peers with the file you want to download is currently online. The more peers you have online, the faster you can get your file. If the seeds is less or none, probably the torrent is not active already.