Hacksar

If you’ve just started using BitTorrent (perhaps thanks to our guide), you may not be fond of the whole “allow people to upload while you download” thing. It kills your bandwidth, and can make using the internet at all difficult, especially if you don’t have a powerful internet connection. It can also pose a great problem if your internet has upload/download limits, and you don’t want to just keep seeding after you finish your download, and thus use up your upload limit rather quickly. (Most places, such as colleges, that use upload/download limits set the upload limit to be much lower than the download limit, so you really need to watch out for that when torrenting).

Here, you’ll learn about how to tweak your settings in uTorrent (our favorite torrent client) to minimize your upload amount and still get the best download speeds you can. Keep reading for the guide.

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If you’ve always wanted to use torrents, but are absolutely TERRIFIED by the prospect of opening your mailbox to find a Cease & Desist, or worse yet, the FBI (they can mail anything nowadays), then you should check out PeerGuardian2.

PeerGuardian2 is a free, open-source program that runs in the background of your system and blocks IP addresses based on an IP blacklist. Generally, this IP blacklist is automatically downloaded and contains multitudes of government IPs. So, you can torrent with the safety of not accidentally connecting to a government facility and possibly incriminating yourself. It self updates, and runs with minimal system performance impact, so it’s easily the best choice for an additional layer for you security-conscious folks. Keep reading for a simple step-by-step guide on how to get PeerGuardian2 up and running.
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If you always seem to miss your favorite TV show, forget to set your DVR, or simply want to watch it on your computer rather than on TV, then here’s the solution.

This program called Torrent Episode Downloader (or TED for short, pretty straightforward name) is easily the best auto-torrent downloader out there. You just add what shows you want, and it will automatically know when the next episode is airing, and scan all the popular torrent sites that day until it finds the torrent. Upon finding it, it’ll send it straight to your BitTorrent client (see our previous post of How To Use BitTorrent if you don’t have BitTorrent set up on your computer or you don’t know what it is).

Best of all, TED has been so reliable that for the past 3 months that I’ve used it, every episode had started downloading 15 minutes after it finished airing realtime. I always get the correct episode (no fakes, etc) and it automatically updates itself to look for the next episode once it finds the current one. That way, you just put in what shows you want once, and let TED be.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.
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So, you’ve heard about this thing called “BitTorrent”, and have no idea what it is. You want to download various things, such as songs, software, movies, tv shows, etc, but don’t know how to get started. Here’s a detailed guide on how to get BitTorrent savvy in just a few minutes.

BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol, but you don’t need to concern yourself with how it works. What you do need to know, however, is how to use BitTorrent. To use it, you need a BitTorrent client. This guide will be using the client uTorrent (v 1.8.2), a free, open-source client that many people say is the most secure, lightest, and easiest client out there.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.
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