Bittorrent Bible: From "Dummy" to "Download" to "Top Gun" Step By Step.

Learning Bittorrent, P2P or File Sharing.  How to download music and movies and lots more.  If you've been hearing about other people using Bittorrent and getting great free downloads but you haven't known how to get started, then this article is for you. It will take you by the hand and show you step by step how to start downloading many of the great music, movies, books, games and programs that are available for free on the internet. And it will be written in plain English -- very little "computerspeak".

All you'll need to do is follow the steps. They will tell you what you need to do to get Bittorrent installed on your computer, and then how to make your first Bittorrent download -- music, movie, book, game, program, or whatever you choose. Finally, they'll show you how to become a Bittorrent Power User -- a BT Top Gun.

For most people I estimate it will take you about an hour until you have started your first Bittorrent download. After that, there will still be lots to learn to become a Top Gun, but you will be up and running, so how much you want to learn and how fast you want to learn it will be up to you.

LEGAL NOTE: This article is for educational purposes. Please do not use anything you might learn here to do anything which might be illegal where you live. There are probably millions of books, games, songs, programs, movies and videos that you can download legally with Bittorrent. And although it can be used to make illegal downloads, too, please don't do it.

Step 1: Getting, Installing, and Starting uTorrent -- Your Bittorrent Program

This Program Is Also Called Your Bittorrent "Client Program" Or Just Your "Client" WARNING: There is almost nothing in the Bittorrent universe that costs money. The currency in the Bittorrent universe is "uploads" or the amount of information you share with other people. So if you find a site that wants to charge you for Bittorrent software, torrents, codecs, or downloads, RUN AWAY! At best, they are scammng you, and at worst, they will attempt to plant viruses and/or spyware into your computer.

The Bittorrent program I use for downloading is called uTorrent. I like it because it's small, fast, relatively easy to understand, and runs great! (And, of course, it's free.)

There are probably 15 or 20 other Bittorrent client programs and some of them have been around for longer than uTorrent. But uTorrent is the program I use and I've been very happy with it, so that's the one we'll cover in this article.

Use your browser to go to www.utorrent.com and download the uTorrent program. At the time I'm writing this article, the first thing you'll see when you go to the uTorrent site is a large green rectangle with "GET UTORRENT" written inside it. Click on the rectangle, download and save the file that the site will send to you, and then double click on the downloaded file. It should then begin installing uTorrent onto your computer.

Follow any prompts on your screen, answer any questions it asks, and you should end up with the uTorrent program installed on your computer. There should also be an icon on your desktop for starting uTorrent.

HINT #1: It would be a good idea to know your maximum internet connection speeds before you start this installation. You'll need to know those speeds for both uploading and downloading because, when I installed uTorrent, the installation routine asked for them.

HINT #2: If the installation routine asks whether or not you want to turn on "DHT", say yes. DHT stands for Distributed Hash Table, a name about as confusing as they could possibly have made it. Think of it as a safety net, though, that will make your downloads run faster and more reliably, and for now, that will be close enough.

HINT #3: If the installation routine asks whether or not you want to turn on encryption, say yes. Some ISP's and other people are hostile to Bittorrent, even if you are using it perfectly legally. By encrypting your data streams, uTorrent helps protect your privacy.

HINT #4 (The Big One): Your uTorrent installation program will also give you the opportunity to test uTorrent's internet connection. Part of the test will involve going to an internet site that will check whether or not your computer has opened the "ports" uTorrent needs to connect properly to the internet. Say a little prayer and ask for your connection to be up and running.

We're going to talk more about ports and connecting uTorrent to the internet further down in this article. For now, though, let's assume your prayer has been answered and uTorrent has found a workable connection to the internet.

If that is not the case, you will have to do a little problem solving to get uTorrent connected. The problem solving will be a lot easier, though, if uTorrent is trying to download something. Why? Because if uTorrent is trying to download something, it is easy to see whether the download is running and how fast it's running.

If the download is running, uTorrent is connected. You can check by looking at the small icon at the bottom center of the uTorrent screen. If it's a small green circle with a check inside, your connection is OK.

If the download is not running, though, uTorrent is probably not connected. You can check by looking at the small icon at the bottom center of your screen. It's probably red, and if you move your cursor over it, it will tell you there is a connection problem and other users cannot find you.

We're going to leave the thorny issue of connections aside for the moment, though, and move on to finding something you want uTorrent to download for you. This is the fun part. There is so much stuff out there it boggles the mind -- my mind, anyhow. Sometimes I'll sit for hours just looking through Bittorrent site indexes.

Here are a few torrents from the opening page (index) of one of the larger Bittorrent sites:

1. Movie: He's Just Not That In To You (DVDRip) Xvid 2009 2. TV: MSQUAD 137 The Woman From Paris (1957) Lee Marvin 3. Comics: Bloom CountyNewspaper Strips 4. WINRaR 3.80 Full~Cracked! 5. Music: Choke Discography (Punk) 6. Other: magic Brad Burt Card Flourishes Vol 1,2 7. Books: Hover Car Racer - Mathew Riley 8. Comics: X-Factor 044 (SaintsAngels) 9. TV: One Tree Hill S06E09.HDTV.XViD-Y esTV.avi 10. Music: HIlltop Hoods-State of the art 11. Other: Miscellaneous [Magic] Marc Paul - Mind 2 Mind 12. Music: Metal pack 13

Click on any torrent and you'll see another screen with more information about what's in it and how it was made. If you click on #12, for example, you find it contains 13 Metal albums including:

Athena - Twighlight of Days Attacker - The Second Coming Griffin - Flight of the Griffin Guardians Of Time - Machines Of Mental Design Plus 7 more....

Now this is just one Bittorrent site. It alone contains over 257,000 more items. And there are hundreds, maybe thousands, more Bittorrent sites! Can you start to see how much is out there just waiting for people who know how to use Bittorrent?

I've found all kinds of treasures including: Censored or banned books, records, and videos; all kinds of porn (of course); collectors' editions; out-of-print items; private collections; information on all kinds of obscure topics; bootleg and underground recordings; different cuts and mixes of songs or videos, some of which were never released, or were released only in a few markets; "sensitive" materials; educational materials including courses on everything from history to magic; "how to" manuals on hacking, programming, motorcycle maintenance, drawing, etc -- and lots more.

The variety of what's available to people who know how to use Bittorrent dwarfs the selection even at places like Amazon and Blockbuster, and thousands of new torrents are being added every day.

OK, so there's a lot of great stuff out there. Let's see about getting one of those .torrent files and starting your first download.

Well, as you can probably see, there's a lot more to this article, but I might have hit the space limits of this section on this site. I hope you like my writing style and would like to see the rest of the article. As I get the time, I will add more sections of the full article to what looks like a very neat site -- Hubpages.

If you would like to see the whole article now, please go to the bottom and follow my link there to the full article all in one place with pix and working links.

Thanks --

Greg711

paradan@gmail.com

P.S. Here's the link:

http://www.squidoo.com/BTDummies