[Thomas Anderson]

And now the ones you might prefer lol

[Thomas Anderson]

[Becky]

I've got a question about that dime website--I got to register, but I can't download anything. Do you have to have a certain program?

[Thomas Anderson]

Well done for managing to register, acounts get snapped up fast.

Torrents work on principle of peer-to-peer downloading. You get the torrent file from the website and run it in a program, I recommend uTorrent and it connects through the website to find other people who have the same file and you download it from them. The files are split into chunks so you might have a file with 100 chunks, you can download chunk 14 from one person, chunk 53 from another person, simultaneously. It is a very fast way to get files.

One thing though keep an eye on your ratio when you've downloaded, it is generally considered fair/normal to seed (leave it uploading) until your ratio is 1, so you've uploaded as much as you've downloaded. You can of course share more than 1 if you can, it always helps.

[Becky]

Thanks for the info! Could I use the same program to upload stuff? For instance--the Stockholm DVDs I made last weekend?

[Thomas Anderson]

Yes, there is a feature to make torrents, in one of the menu's, it should let you just select the folder, and you have to put in the name of the tracker (to be found on the upload page of the site)

It can take a while to upload something, especially a double dvd. What down/up speed do you have?

[Becky]

I have DSL, but I don't know what speed that is.

[Thomas Anderson]

http://www.adslguide.org/tools/speedtest.asp

This one is pretty good I think

[Becky]

Every time I try to do a speed test, the program closes. :P

[Thomas Anderson]

Hmm try another, there are lots, just Google "broadband speed test" or something to that effect. I only mention it because it can be hard to share as much as you download on torrents because upload speeds tend to be awful in comparison to download speed.

My download speed is 2mb and upload speed 0.25mb, so if I downloaded something at full speed and it took an hour, I'd have to share it for a further 7 hours (including the original hour) to get my ratio back to 1. In reality downloads rarely hit your maximum, but still you can be sharing for ages to hit 1 again, and sometimes you can't do it and have to make it up on another one.