Torrent Tutorial

What is torrent? A torrent file (*.torrent) may not large in size, but with it you can download much larger file. It's because a torrent file contains only information about the download structure. When you download a file using torrent, it doesn't come as one big chunk like you download files ordinarily, but you are downloading pieces from many people all over the internet. This is why downloading using torrents usually increase your download speed.
But the download speed here depends on how many people are sharing the file while downloading, and how many seeders are seeding the file. "Seeders" mean people regularly share the file to keep the torrent alive. If no one is sharing the file at the time, then you can't download it.
To download using .torrent file, you will need a Torrent client on your PC. There are so many Torrent clients, such as the first client BitTorrent , Vuze (formerly Azureus), LimeWire, OneSwarm. Currently I am using uTorrent. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

How to use torrent file? It's easy. Here are steps to download file using the uTorrent (I have tried some other clients, don't worry, they work the quite same way):

1. Download the *.torrent file. For example, I want to download an American Idol episode, then I look for "American Idol audition 6 torrent" in Google. Found one from The Pirate Bay. Now I have American_Idol_S10E06.torrent file.

2. Open the .torrent file using torrent client. Once you have a torrent client installed in your PC, you can just double-click the file to open it using the client, or right-click on it and choose open with, or launch the application first, whichever convenient. Here, I launch my uTorrent and go to File > Add Torrent.

3. You will see this window. If the torrent contains multiple files, you can select ones you want to download.

4. The download begins. You can see the file information on the bottom part of the window. You will not only see download speed, but also upload speed. This is how the downloaded file shared among torrent users.

5. Torrents are commonly used to download large files like movies and games. That is why torrent desktop clients provide pause download option. You may then close the application, or even turn your computer off. You can resume your download when you run the application again by clicking play.

The stop option will stop the download and upload of the file (you are sharing the file while you are downloading it) when download(s) is/are in progress -- that's right, you can download multiple files from multiple torrents at a time, even set priorities on them. After you finished downloading, the stop button will stop uploading the file. But it is not recommended, because if all people stop sharing files then the torrent will be dead.