It's amazing how quickly BitTorrent has become one of the major download formats. With good reason too: it's fast, equitable and efficient. If you haven't yet installed a BitTorrent client on your PC, you should as there are some great free clients available. Try Azureus. It's beautifully implemented, well supported and, being Java based, is available for multiple platforms. It's very feature rich, and supports embedded trackers (so you can host your own torrents), UPnP, a distributed decentralized database for decentralized torrents, and DHT (Distributed Hash Table) which distributes indexing responsibility across multiple clients rather than relying on a single web-based tracker, plus many other features. There's a lot of plug-ins available for Azureus including a competent RSS feed scanner. One downside is that the Java code eats up your CPU cycles, so you need a reasonably fast PC.
A good alternative is uTorrent, which is tiny but very fast. It's also lean on resources, easy to use, and requires no installation. Its formidable feature list includes trackerless downloads, multiple simultaneous downloads, multi-scrape, UPnP, and an inbuilt RSS reader, which is an impressive achievement for such a tiny package.
A new arrival on the scene is BitTyrant, a hot-rodded version of Azureus. The modification is fiendishly clever. While most clients only consider the number of peers available for downloading, BitTyrant also considers the capacity of each peer and the data rate required to ensure reciprocation. It uses a dynamic algorithm to send data only to the highest capacity peers at the minimum rate for them to reciprocate. In plain English, this translates to your downloads running faster, much faster; around 65%.
The standard Azureus client may be one of the most full featured clients available, but it's certainly not the fastest kid on the block. With the BitTyrant mods, though, it's a speed demon.
But there's a downside and a serious one at that. This mod breaks down the fairness characteristics of the BitTorrent protocol. That means if you use BitTyrant the performance of other users will suffer to some degree. Now I'm not comfortable with that, but it's not up to me to tell you what you should feel.
A fair-minded and very informative guide to the BitTorrent scene can be found at http://www.slyck.com/
Product Details
Azureus
Website: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Download link: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php
Author: Azureus
Version: 3.0.5.2
Date: Unknown
Download file size: 7.6 MB
License: Freeware (Open source)
Operating systems supported: Any PC that supports Java
64 Bit version available: No, but this 32 bit program works in a 64 bit environment
Portable version available: Unknown
Other languages supported: Many - see here: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/index.php
Additional software required: No
uTorrent
Website: http://www.utorrent.com/
Download link:
Author: xtort.net software
Version: 1.7.7
Date: Unknown
Download file size: 214 KB
License: Freeware
Operating systems supported: Wine, Windows 95 (Winsock2), 98/ME, NT/2000, XP, 2003, Vista
64 Bit version available: No, but this 32 bit program works in a 64 bit environment
Portable version available: Unknown
Other languages supported: Many - see here: http://www.utorrent.com/download.php
Additional software required: No
BitTyrant
Website: http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/
Download link: +
Author: Students and Faculty at Washington University
Version: 1.1.1
Date: 09/07/2007
Download file size: 8.1 MB
License: Freeware
Operating systems supported: Any PC that supports Java
64 Bit version available: No, but this 32 bit program works in a 64 bit environment
Portable version available: Unknown
Other languages supported: None
Additional software required: Java 1.5