by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Here I’m going to show you the quickest way to get up and running. It takes 5 minutes. At the end is some stuff regarding legality if you’re interested.

What is it?

Torrenting is a way to share files, meaning you can download movies, music, and ebooks from other users. It’s super easy to do.

I’ll refer to the file you’re trying to download as a ‘torrent’.

How to download torrents

There are 3 small steps: step 1 is the setup, steps 2 & 3 will show you how to find and download a torrent.

1) Download a torrent client

I use µTorrent. You can download it here. It’s worked for years, its simple to use, and it looks like this:

the µTorrent client

2) Find the torrent you want

Search for torrents with this website. Clicking the ship with the black background opens a site like the one pictured below (UKBay opens a different site each time, making it more reliable).

So I type in what I want to search for, and now I have a long list of torrents that matched my search.

Searching for torrents in The Pirate Bay

How to pick a good one? For a movie, I want one with the best quality, the fastest download time and the smallest size. That little ‘SE’ column on the right means ‘seeders’, and that’s the amount of places my computer can download the file from. The more seeders, the faster the download.

720p is good enough for me, 545.71 MiB is pretty small for a movie, and 67 is a decent number of seeders, so I’ll choose the top one.

I choose it by clicking the little red magnet (under the ‘C’ in ‘Chicken Run’).

3) Download the torrent

Clicking the magnet opens a box on my desktop, asking me if I‘m sure I want to torrent Chicken Run. Press ‘OK’.

downloading in µTorrent (not my computer)

And there it is downloading in the torrent client. When it’s finished (the green bar is full), the torrent’s status will turn to ‘seeding’. This means other people will be able to download it from you. If you don’t want them to, press stop. ‘seeding’ will turn into ‘finished’.

And you’re done! Repeat steps 2 and 3 to download more stuff.

Extra (unessential) things to know

The little magnifying glass takes you to your downloads folder, where you can watch/listen to/read whatever it was you just torrented. Pressing ‘remove’ just removes the torrent from µTorrent (it will still exist on your computer).

Seeding a file is a nice thing to do. More seeders means people in future will be able to torrent the file faster. But it does use a bit of your internet speed, so most people don’t bother.

Some people recommend that you turn off automatic updates on µTorrent. You can do that in ‘preferences’. Just uncheck the box that says ‘Automatically check for updates’.

Here’s a more in-depth introduction video to torrenting from µTorrent.

Finally, for all the latest torrenting info from the loveable maniacs on reddit, check out r/torrents.

Is it illegal?

In short, no. Torrenting itself isn’t illegal, it’s just a way to share files. What is illegal is sharing a copyrighted file, even via a memory stick.

If you were to torrent a copyrighted file, it’s extremely unlikely anything bad would happen. For obvious reasons, law enforcers typically go after the people that own sites like ‘The Pirate Bay’, not the millions of people who use it.

You can read up on the legality of torrenting in more detail here.

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