Since the internet came to our homes, the possibilities of accessing infinite content on the web have increased exponentially. About ten years ago, we found it almost impossible to control a computer located on the other side of the planet remotely from our sofa, with enough quality to be able to work comfortably and without interruptions. And today, with a computer and an internet connection we can do the unthinkable.
Of course, there are many ways to share files, but today we are going to rely on the torrent. The torrent sites it's just a kind of p2p downloads, or what is the same, peer to peer. This, in the language of Cervantes does not mean more than share files between two machines or users. And the most popular torrent manager is uTorrent, which we are going to talk about today. Will allow us share files, as well as download and allow others to download what we want. Keep reading and don't lose any detail to get the most out of this useful tool.
The first thing to keep in mind is that uTorrent is available for both Mac and PC and Linux. We will have to enter your official website and press the green button that we will find in sight to download it. The process will start automatically, downloading the appropriate installer for our operating system. Once downloaded, we just have to follow the steps shown by the installer itself so that, finally, uTorrent is already running on our machine.
When you open the program for the first time, in your main screen see three clearly differentiated parts. The most important is the download space, where we will have various information about each download that we have in progress, as we will see later. On the left side we will have the side bar, where we can discriminate which files we see on the screen based on their status: downloading, completed, active, inactive or all. At the bottom of the screen we will have a information panel with several tabs, where we can choose information such as the upload and download speed in real time graphically, General information about the file in question, the folders by which it is composed, and so on.
It is very important once the program is installed and before you start using it, that we make a correct configuration of the same. Thus, the user experience will be more satisfactory, gaining speed in downloads and having all our content much more organized. They are five minutes worth investing in this series of things that we explain below.
In section general from the preferences menu, we will have different options that can be explained by themselves. Options like automatic start of the application when we turn on our equipment, ask before leaving, start downloads automatically or the language, for example. In short, basic settings of use that the program allows us.
Another of the most important options for the proper functioning of uTorrent is the bandwidth configuration. Usually uTorrent manages it automatically (with the first box checked), but we can decide this manually. Well if you do not want torrent downloads to be done with all the bandwidth of your network, or because you want to limit it so that it does not exceed a certain number in particular, you can adjust each value manually, both in download and upload. If you have one internet fee with a certain amount of limited data, there is an option called limit rate, in which you can configure the amount of data that you allow the program to share, either up or down, in a given period of time.
And finally, the configuration possibility that can help you the most when managing downloads with uTorrent is its programmer. In the tab that bears his name, you will only have to check the box and then you can configure it to your liking. Each cell corresponds to a range of one hour during each day of the week, and is color-coded with four different options: unlimited, limit activated, only seeding and program deactivated. With this you can configure program activity depending on the load that is normally in your home network, allowing that while working with the computer uTorrent does not exceed a limit set by you at the bottom of the screen, while in hours of little network use, have the unlimited speed. If these options are not enough for you and your network speed is slow, remember these tricks to improve the speed of your WiFi network.
Once with the application configured, it is time to start a download. To be able to download with uTorrent, we will first need to have the .torrent file of what we want to download. This file with a .torrent extension is nothing more than a small document which, when opened with uTorrent, provides the basic information of what we want to get, and from where you should download it. We can get them across the network, on the typical "music and movie download" pages. In this post we are not going to name any, as they are subject to constant change, and perhaps in a while, they will no longer be available.
But only one is enough little google search writing what we want to download with the surname «torrent» and it will not be easy for us to find it. We just have to download said file with .torrent extension and when you open it uTorrent will take care of the rest.
Once opened with uTorrent, it will appear in the download screen. The essential data to take into account are:
- El name of the file we are downloading
- The bar progress of the discharge, as a percentage
- El state of the download, as there will be files that are inactive for a certain period of time
- La speed loading and unloading, located in the "Speed" tab of the lower panel.
With this data we can monitor in real time the status of our download. Once the progress bar is complete and reaches 100%, it will be indicative that our download has finished, so we will already have the file in the folder which we have indicated as the destination in the uTorrent preferences. We just have to open it with the corresponding program and enjoy it on our computer.
If you prefer to use P2P alternatives, don't miss our article on servers for eMule with which you can also download files easily.