What is a torrent?

(talking about torrents in computer terminology)

Torrent is a small file (around few kilobytes) with the suffix .torrent, which contains all the information needed to download a file the torrent was made for. That means it contains file names, their sizes, where to download from and so on. You can get torrents for almost anything on lots of web sites and torrent search engines.

Torrent is the most popular way of downloading large files, including movies and games (remember legality of downloading)

Downloading with a torrent is advantageous especially when downloading files, which are momentarily very popular and whitch lots of people are downloading. Because the more people download the file, the higher speed for everyone (see torrent principle).

• torrent is a file
• with torrents you can download almost everything on the net
• every file (or set of files) need to have an unique torrent file to download it
• to download anything through a torrent you need a torrent client

You probably already tried another ways of p2p sharing - torrent is just another method. The original BitTorrent client was written in Python and it has been made open-source. Thanks to that, we have a large variety of torrent clients today. Just choose which one you like.

This is the original Bit Torrent logo

How to download files with a torrent?

Downloading with a torrent is actually very simple. You just need a rightly set torrent client (setting your connection speed is usually all you need to set). Then you open the torrent file inside your client, set a place where you want to download desired files and then just wait till it's downloaded. Downloading with a torrent is no more complicated than using any other p2p application, but even simpler.

Newest client versions:
uTorrent - 1.7.7(220 KB)
Azureus - 3.0.5.0(7,5 MB)

If you want to know more about torrents, continue to torrent principles or if you know enough, go pick a client to download.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(software)