µTorrent review

This is a guest review of uTorrent by Peter.

Most frequent Internet users are familiar with torrent files. Torrents are efficient ways of distributing large files because they break the files up into lots of little pieces and use peer-to-peer technology to make the uploading and downloading process go faster. A lot of torrents are illegal, but there are plenty of legitimate torrent sources. For example, there are a few sites dedicated to legal torrent downloads, and a lot of open-source software is distributed through bit torrents.

For Windows users, the best choice for a torrent program is µTorrent. (It is sometimes called uTorrent, since the “µ” symbol is hard to type.) µTorrent has two main advantages over other torrent clients: speed and features. Unlike the more prominent Bittorrent client, µTorrent is a relatively light-weight program that minimizes processor usage. The most recent version 1.7.7 is only 214 kB. It’s so small that µTorrent is easily made portable. But this doesn’t stop µTorrent from packing tons of features. The appearance of the program is completely customizable, and you can control everything about the downloads — how much bandwidth to use, when to use it, how much to upload, what to do with the files, etc. µTorrent also incorporates several of the best torrent search engines, whereas Bittorrent only uses its own Bittorrent search.

µTorrent allows you to control how much bandwidth you use, either globally for each individual download. You can even select which files in each torrent to download first. For example, if I want to download the torrent for the audio book of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I might want to download the first few chapters first so I can start listening to the book sooner. µTorrent has lots of other great features, such as scheduled downloads and data tracking graphs and statistics. You won’t get lost, though –there is plenty of documentation and how-to support available for first-time torrent users.

µTorrent is a Windows-only program, although you can get it to run on a Mac or Linux with a little know-how. For the hard-core open source crowd, you can try Deluge, which is a project that attempts to create a cross-browser torrent client with all of the features µTorrent has, plus signature open-source features like plug-ins.