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Was out for a drink last Thursday with some friends and the conversation somehow turned to BitTorrent downloads. There was some confusion about how the bittorrent clients works as well as where to search for and find bit-torrents.

Now I’m no expert in this subject. I was once one of those with absolutely no idea how to go about downloading torrents. In fact, it is only recently (last month, I think), that I started using bittorrent. It all started because I wanted to catch the latest instalment of Initial-D Stage Four: Project D. As a matter of convenience, here’s my idiot’s guide to BitTorrent downloads:

1. Download a BitTorrent client. I recommend the original client from Bittorrent.com.
2. Install the BitTorrent client.
3. Startup the BitTorrent client
4. Point your browser to any of the popular torrent search sites (or torrent search engines). A good resource for finding such sites is BitTorrentTopsites.com.
5. Use the search function in the torrent search engine to locate torrent streams. Alternatively, you can also use the search function provided by the torrent client.
6. Once you locate a torrent file, copy the torrent URL. Open the torrent URL in the BitTorrent client (you can do so by selecting ‘Open Torrent URL’ from the File menu or pressing ‘Ctrl+U’ and pasting the copied URL).
7. The BitTorrent client will automatically start queuing the torrent stream for download.
8. Wait for the download to complete and enjoy the show.

The amount of time required for torrent downloads to complete varies, depending on the size of the torrent, your bandwidth, the availibity of the torrents, and also a little luck. I managed to download episodes 17 to 22 of Initial D in under 10 hours. That’s 6 episodes of 175MBs each. 1GB in 10 hours. Way faster than using some of the popular download clients like eDonkey or Kazaa. I remember it took me more than a week to download episode 16 on eDonkey!

Incidentally, I am using Torrent Typhoon to search for bit torrents. Hope this helps to get you started. Good luck on your searches and downloads.