Quote:
Originally Posted by GaryVaux  yeah always confused me 2! Any 1 with able to explian? (dont shout at me  lol) |
Think of everyones files as an un-sorted library of books. How do you find the book you are looking for? As you can probably imagine on the internet there are an almost infinate number of books/files, so searching for them in a traditional "windows search" way (ie in a linear fasion; one at a time until you find the right one) would take forever.
Thats where Torrents come in. Think of a torrent as a link to get that book. That book can come from multiple sources, a page from here a page from there, hence why torrents are so fast; you are downloading from dozens of differant people at the same time. A torrent site (
www.isohunt.com etc) is simply a collection of links/torrents which are organised so that you can search them, some sites specialise in videos, some music etc but most do abit of everything.
Therefore to get the book/file you want;
you go on the torrent site
search the collection of links/torrents for the one you want
click the link and download the torrent file
open the torrent with your torrent client (azureus, uTorrent etc)
your file magically downloads and all is well*
*what actually happens is your torrent client then asks what is known as a "tracker" for the addresses of every person who has that file (whether they have the full file [a seed] or are still downloading the file [leechers]) so that you can start downloading from them. In this way even if only a few people have the full file you are not sat in a que waiting; the seed distributes the peices/pages to a few leechers, they in turn pass them on to others, and so on increasing your download speed as you go.
One of the main advantages of torrents, apart from the speed, is thta you can see how many people have the file you want (seeds). On sites like isohunt you can see how many seeds and leechers there are. You need atleast 1 seed to download the full file (but dont rely fully on what the torrent site says as they are sometimes wrong). With kazaa/etc you never quite knew if you were going to get to the top of the que and actually download the file. Also you dont tend to get half as many virus infected files.
