An Introduction to BitTorrent clients

What exactly is BitTorrent? If BitTorrent is an unknown concept to you, I highly suggest checking out Wikipedia’s article on exactly what BitTorrent is. If you don’t feel like reading that article, BitTorrent is essentially a protocol that is used for multiple computers to communicate with each other. Just like there is HTTP, SSH, FTP and IRC, BitTorrent is simply another way for computers to chat. Before there was BitTorrent, there was Napster and the many p2p clones that spawned from Shawn Fanning’s creation. Once those centralized p2p networks started to fail, BitTorrent was created to decentralize file sharing and ease the burden on file sharing servers. Now that we know the basic services that BitTorrent provides, let’s walk through the process of utilizing BitTorrent to download files and decide on the proper client for you.

Hardware and Software

Depending on which operating system you are running and the hardware that your computer is packing will partially decide which BitTorrent client you should or could use. Due to the fact that I run my computers on Windows XP, I will be focusing on XP compatible clients, however I still have a few links for non-XP readers. Different clients will require different resources to run, some require more memory, others will require more clock cycles, and some just won’t run at all depending on how old and limited your system is. Torrents do not require the fastest processor or the most amount of ram, but the one thing that will at least ease the burden on your computer will be a 7200 RPM drive. Since torrents do not sequentially access data from your hard drive, if you have a slow drive, the slow access times could potentially bottleneck you, but then again this will only be a concern if you are running a very high speed connection. So the basics are preferably something that runs your favorite operating system and I’d suggest at least 512MB of ram along with a decent capacity 7200 RPM drive. If you don’t plan on running your client 24/7 and distributing files, any computer will suffice, my recommendations are simply to make the downloading and sharing process the best it can be.

Reference http://gomeler.com/2006/04/23/an-introduction-to-bittorrent-clients/
More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_client

About BitTorrent Protocol
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)

BitTorrent.org http://www.bittorrent.org/introduction.html