Bittorenting for the first time can be a scary and unfamiliar process. There are thousands of scams and viruses just waiting for an unsuspecting first time downloader to come in clicking around without caution and then BAM. They get hit with spyware, adware, trojans, and other viruses that can make a computer completely unusable. At first the viruses can be sneaky and quiet, but once they start adding up, they can steal all of your computer's bandwidth, CPU processing space, infect your Hard Disk Drive, spy on your computer, and make it almost impossible for a normal user to ever get rid of them. So the first thing you are going to need, is caution.
Caution is one thing that I did not have when I first started downloading. I was young and stupid and thought I knew what I was doing until I finally ended up making my computer useless until I figured out how to fix the mistakes I had made. I will go into the exact steps of how to be cautious in a later post, but for now the one piece of advice I am going to state is do not start clicking around on everything that looks legitimate. And there certainly are exceptions to this rule but I have come to realize that you should never press the big button. (This rule is only meant to be applied with The Pirate Bay) I will go into a bit more detail about what that means in my next post. For now, lets talk about what programs you are going to need.
- The first thing you will need is a platform for downloading your files onto. This is similar to Itunes or Steam, which are used for downloading and organized music, movie, and video game files. The platform I recommend using is uTorrent <-Click to go to website. Once you are on the main page, there should be a button that looks like this.
Go ahead and click the button and when it prompts you, click save file. It shouldn't take too long to finish downloading. - Secondly, you are going to need a good website to download files from. There are quite a few, including uTorrent which has its own search engine used to find downloadable torrents, but the website that I highly recommend is thepiratebay<-Click. The Pirate Bay is a polish website where torrenting is perfectly legal. They even joke around at the idea of Americans trying to sue them. On their website they have posted threat emails and their responses which I find quite humorous and have linked in the word "responses". Something to remember about The Pirate Bay is that they do have ads, and one must be careful not to click the ad and download the wrong file. There is also one pop up every time you enter The Pirate Bay, but this is just business and it is not a pop up virus so do not worry.
- Lastly, an optional step, but recommended if you are planning on downloading movies. The Pirate Bay's torrents have a very wide range of video file formats that microsoft video player and many other default players will just not play, for instance mkv which is a Russian file. There is one program that I recommend above all others. VLC Media Player(Click). VLC will play almost every video format out there, so once you set it as your default video player, you will never have to worry about a video not playing again. Once you get to the website you should see something along the lines of this...
Click this button and save file when prompted as with any normal download.
So far, I've given you the materials you need, the place to go, and the caution you should have and I hope this helps you to get started on your journey to bittorenting. The steps listed are the basic stepping stones needed, but there is always more that can be learned such as which files are safe to download, how to tell the difference between an ad and the real thing, how to find either the fastest download or instead the highest quality download, and lastly how to become a good sharer and seed files so that it makes it easier for everyone to download.
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