It isn't just on April Fool's Day that people will be tricked into paying money for otherwise free BitTorrent related stuff on the internet. Ever wondered exactly what's inside these guides that promise to speed up your torrents? Read on, as we turn the tables on those charging for freely available information.

There can’t be many people in the BitTorrent community who haven’t seen the various sites scattered around the web that promise to speed up your torrents by ridiculous amounts – for a cash payment, of course.

One such site is HighSpeedTorrent.com and they are offering:

Speaking of ads for such sites, the admin of BTJunkie previously told us: “I don’t allow it on our site because it’s a scam. It’s like a bad infomercial for torrents.”

So what is in this great guide that supposedly allows you to increase speeds by 500%?

Chapter 1: The Different Torrent ClientsÂ­ Reviewed

Really. This chapter is dedicated to ‘reviewing’ torrent clients. After mentioning uTorrent, BitTorrent, Azureus and BitTornado, uTorrent is declared the winner. yay.

Coolest feature: Utorrent gives you charts which show what pieces of a torrent you’ve already downloaded and which ones are on their way to you right now.

The guide explains about the importance of opening ports to get fast transfers – and then fails to tell the purchaser of the guide how to do this. Instead it points the user to portforward.com – a FREE resource on all port-forwarding issues. Genius.

And so it goes on. The guide completely fails to realize that its target audience is the BitTorrent novice as it regularly uses terms they won’t understand, while offering advice about choosing ports, only to contradict it later on, with settings based on the author’s “256K connection”. Nice

Statements like “If you have a firewall you may want to set it to allow your file sharing program to have access to the internet” along with advice to ask your ISP if you don’t know your routers password, don’t exactly inspire confidence.

Chapter 3 lists software to “Help Boost Your P2P Download Speeds” and are all a complete waste of time.

The main problem I have with such guides is the way that they target the complete novice, while completely failing to give them something they can actually use. They play on the new BitTorrent user’s inexperience and charge them money for sub-standard guides which will never give purchasers the ability to increase their speeds by anywhere near the amount they claim.

And all this for $49.95 – well, actually, the guide is on special offer for $9.95 right now – if you hurry (these offers always suggest that they are time limited).

Or, if you’d rather get the great HighSpeedTorrent guide for free, simply click here – it’s openly available, right from the HighSpeedTorrent site.

Do you really want to increase your download speeds for free? If so, help yourself to some of our guides, hints and tips. There’s 20 more of the best right here.

All 100% free. Now that’s the TorrentFreak guarantee.