It’s been mentioned elsewhere on the site and there is also another thread for it (which I don’t like), but I’m starting another. Why? Because someone asked me to. This should be everything you need to know.
This software is great for serving big files because instead of one computer serving many, on serves to a few and those few serve to each other and everybody shares with everybody. So basically the more people downloading (and uploading) the faster your speeds are, as opposed to more people downloading equaling slower speeds.
Personally I use Shareaza for my torrents. It’s an all-in-one P2P client, connecting to Gnutella, Gnutella2, and eDonkey networks, and handles torrents and can even work as a download manager for browsers (in a somewhat awkward manner, though). My speeds are generally anything between 1K through 70K, just depending on the number of seeds really.
And before anyone goes nuts about encouraging piracy, Bittorrent is a file transfer system that’s getting more and more use as a distribution method for game demos, patches, updates, and other files, since it’s not as bandwidth intensive as central storage.
Thanks for the Shareza link. I am using that now. I also inadvertently downloaded the Mercora network for quick sampler before downloading songs from new artists that I don’t know very well.
