Isohunt: Has nearly 400,000 torrents, and even though it might not look very flashy it is very efficient. The page loads quickly and the layout is very clear. Type in what you’re looking for and check the results below. On the homepage, the creator always has some interesting news to report. This also includes the number of times they have been sued for doing what they do.There’s a “Top Searches” section which comes handy when you are bored and have no clue what to look for. On using the search bar, the search results are displayed in a folder-type manner. You can see the name of the torrent, how long it’s been on the site for, the number of seeders and leechers and the category. On clicking the torrent name; a scrollable box slides down below the selected torrent which gives the link to download the torrent file and all the details like the files that will be downloaded and where was the torrent tracked from.

Mininova: One of the most well organised torrent tracker websites that you can go to. It has a great search engine which provides fast and accurate results. They recently updated their servers to improve the services they provide. The look and feel of this site is very friendly with great features packed in very systematically. If you are clueless of where you are or what you’re doing, there is the FAQ section which is very helpful. You can browse the different categories like games, TV shows, movies; by clicking on the button which says just that (told you its simple). The categories are subdivided for your convenience, for example, by clicking on Games you get to choose the specific platform that you’re game belongs to. On the homepage you can see the last 10 torrents added in each category which is very useful if you’re looking for the latest stuff.

Releaselog: Rlslog has gained popularity really fast and you need to visit this site to see how dedicated their crew is into make the user experience on the site, pleasant and useful. Even though it is not a very well know torrent tracker, Rlslog is really efficient in doing what it does.

They release music albums days in advance of their official use and new movies are made available on the same day of their release. The latest version of well-known software is available much before you might even hear of it. And these are not just links to the torrent files; every post comes with full information about the videos quality, what the torrent is all about and there are links under each post which are very helpful. In case of movies, a link to the movie’s IMDB (Internet Movie Database) page is given, the NFO file, which is basically a notepad file which is create by the group that has released the torrent (contains useful information about the file being downloaded) and the same goes for TV shows.

They might not be as quick as Eztv, but they do provide info about the episode and the quality of the video. Whenever there is a post regarding a new movie that has been made available online, there are links to sample jpegs (which are basically screenshots taken of the video) so you can decide whether to download it or not. If it is a game, then there are links provided to popular game review sites if one wants to see the rating of the game or anything that the website has to provide. People can leave comments and rate the torrents which can, again, help you decide whether to go for the download or not.
The best part of Releaselog is that it is web-log, and not just a torrent tracker, about latest IT trends, hardware and software news, gadgets, games, movies. So, visiting this website just once a day is enough to keep you up to date with what’s going on in the world of technology and showbiz. It has more than 40,000 unique visitors a day which definitely makes it worth a try.

TORRENT TERMINOLOGY SIMPLIFIED

TORRENT - this is what you download from a torrent tracker website. It is a file that is like a link to the actual content that you want to download. Torrent clients use this file to locate people who have the file that you're looking for and then send it in pieces.

PEERS - these are people who are sharing the pieces of a file that they have and receiving new pieces from other people. So the more the peers the greater are your download speeds, the condition being that the number of seeders is also large.

SEEDERS - these are the kind hearted souls who have finished downloading the file completely and are just supplying the worm (here the word worm does not refer to a virus or anything like that, more on the lines of food) to the hungry chicks. The more the seeders the more “available” the pieces of the file are, therefore better are the download speeds.

LEECHERS - the kanjoos, makhee-choos people on the planet, who think of no one but themselves. Leechers, as you mite have figured out from the term, are people who are like parasites. They do more harm than good. After downloading file completely, if a peer decides to delete the torrent and not let it continue to upload, he or she becomes a leecher. By default a torrent client maintains the ratio of upload to download, usually the former being greater than the latter, but leechers are people who play around with the settings of their clients so that they don't upload as much as they download.

TRACKER - this is like the coordinator of a school telling people what to do when and basically organizing the BitTorrent client. When you open a torrent, the tracker helps you get a list of people who are ready to give and take pieces of the file you want to download (peers and seeders), and your computer continuously sends updates to the tracker regarding how much of the file has been downloaded and uploaded and the time left for the download to finish.

uTorrent Engage!

So now that you know where to get what from, here’s how you go about using the most downloaded client.

1. Download the client: Go to www.utorrent.com/download.php and download the program, save the setup file and then install the program.
2. Download a torrent: click on the Download torrent icon on any of the tracker sites and save it in a directory.
3. Open the torrent: if you only have uTorrent installed on your computer as a torrent client, then the torrent file will open the torrent with uTorrent as default (phew, too many torrents to swallow at once, oh there is one more!)
4. Select the location for saving the file. Click on the button with the dots for selecting a specific location. By default all the files in the torrent are selected for download. You can change this by removing the ticks in front of the file name, this is mostly used when you want to download some tracks out of a music album or select episodes from a season of a TV show. You can go to the advanced tab and select the bandwidth that you want to allocate to uploading and downloading. There’s also an option of starting an application after the downloading is done.
5. Your torrent should start downloading the files onto your computer after this. The important things to note here are download and upload speeds, and ETA, which is basically the estimated time taken to finish downloading the file.

There are different tabs below the list of files being downloaded. The General tab has information regarding the tracker, the transfer details and general statistics about the download. The Peers tab displays all the peers that you’re connected to. Under Pieces you can view the different pieces of the file that are being downloaded. The files tab lets you see the files that are being downloaded. Under speed you can view the upload and download sped in a statistical manner.

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