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silverfire

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If you fully switched from a different BitTorrent client and you want to, please write a short paragraph or a long essay here about your switch. Posts must be in complete sentences with a serious attempt at correct grammar and spelling. Imagine as if you were writing it as an article for a magazine. Posts that don't make sense to me will be deleted. If a post isn't horrible and in rescuable condition, I might edit it to correct your grammar or spelling mistakes.

That said, write away :D

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Confessions of an Azureus leecher..

Yes I said it.... I confess. I was that guy. I used to be an Azureus leecher.

I would always shut down Azureus as soon as a download completed, sometimes sharing as little as 5%. Why? I was frustrated whenever I left Azureus running. I would wake up in the morning, waiting what felt like minutes for the system to display and start operating properly. Or, I would come home from work, and the wife complained she couldn't use the computer, as 'it was stuck'.

When I found µTorrent, I was happy to have a program that did not drain my system over time. I found I could just leave µTorrent running. sharing more all along.

I am now sharing 125% minimum on torrents and I am glad that µTorrent has made me a responsible, respected, and reformed BitTorrent user.

Thanks

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Another (ex) Azureus fanboy ;)

µTorrent v1.2 is the fastest version yet, and I have now fully removed myself from Team AZureus :w00t:

It Took less than 1second to download, around 1 minute to set up (from default configuration), and im maxxed out on a public torrent!

Same torrent on AZureus i've been trying for over 3 days to get a good speed, restarting etc to get a different set of peers... No use!

AZureus -> Downloading at 10KB/sec, uploading at 22KB/sec

µTorrent -> Downloading at 110KB/sec and uploading at 25KB/sec

Absolutely INCREDIBLE :yikes: Party on team µTorrent!

Additional information which may be relevant:

EventID patched to 500 simultaneous half-open connections

Global Max Connections: 200

max Number of Connections Per Torrent: 50 (<- that may very well seem very low, but µTorrent does an incredible job of removing slow peers, and just keeping the good ones!)

net.max_halfopen = 8 (default - If its not broke, don't `fix` it ;))

Port used: 53142, forwarded in router, and uPNP enabled within router and application

µTorrent just gets stronger by the day! and im a proud convert :w00t:

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ex Bitcomet/Azureus user

I made the switch after the latest release of µTorrent. I became fed up with Bitcomet after the frequent

GUI freezes which I began experiencing from version 0.57 onwards and the slow down in development.

Whilst Azureus had many features I found that it would crash after a few hours, despite the hefty specs of my computer. After much tinkering I got bored and decided to give µTorrent a try. I was pleasantly surprised. I have had no problems with it whatsoever and my 2Mb connection is maxed out on popular torrents (as you would expect). I was also pleased with the implementation of ipfilter.dat and DHT as normally small client = poor features.

Overall I have found µTorrent to be an impressive piece of programming and hope it becomes the popular

torrent client it deserves to be. Keep up the good work.

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abc/µTorrent

abc was a decent client. I have used just about every client available for bit torrent. My favorite site had a strong recommedation and an excellent guide for installing and configuring µTorrent. The switch was simple, painless and TOTALY worth the effort. I really like the features and simplicity of µTorrent. An outstanding and well thought out program. I give it a "10 out of 10". Props to you all ;) In fact, I was so impressed I had to make a small donation...it might get ya couple slices of pizza :D

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from an EX-PTC/G3/ABC user

I've pretty much tried every client out there at least once. As a self proclamed freeware addict I tend to try out a great number of programs to find the one that fits in with my uses perfectly. I tend to look for software that have at least 2 of these three traits in order of importance: Free, Small, No installer. µtorrent has all three and so that makes it damn near perfect in my book. I've been extremely impressed with the amount of features that the devs have been able to cram into such a small package. I can't see any reason to leave the fold now.

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I play around with softwares, from BitTornado to Azureus to ABC to even BitComet. I've been searching for that "One Client To Rule Them All". On a research into BitComet, I stumble upon uTorrent. Skeptic at first, I gave it a test run. And run did it ever. Small resource usage, simple yet informative (as well as familiar) interface, and enough features for the power user to make the most out of their BitTorrent connections. I don't think I'll ever find a better client than this. To me, it's the perfect client. It does what it does and there's active development into fixing bugs and adding other (possible) necessary features, all while running from a compact executable file that has yet to break the 150 kilobyte mark.

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I never thought of changing from ABC untill recently, the client started to lock up, i would be fine for around 20 to 30mins then it would just freeze, the status would still be green but no movements. I found it really distressing, tried BitTornado, BitComet then tried a earlier version of ABC but they all did the same thing, one of the moderators on the mininova forum told me to try utorrent, so i did, its an excellent client, very light and quick, people on the forum have reported it freezing up like the others which is a bit disheartening but im just hoping it works out...

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Thanks a million for providing such a fantastic product.

I am new to p2p and do not have powerful specs on my computer.

I started with bittorrent and in the past few months tried most of the clients. Azureus was the worst. You guessed what happened to me when I would get very slow downloads - I never thought it was problems with the clients but somehow my bandwidth and computer. And.....

Then I switched to Utorrent. I get fantastic (compared to the past) download speeds that don't die as soon as I seed. It is so easy to use also. I will loudly recommend it to one and all.

Great job guys.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had been searching off and on for a good BT client. I'd tried many, but like many programs out today, they were just too much for my machine to handle. Some just didn't have a usable interface. Some were so bloated as to make my machine limp along and suffer from timouts constantly. Then somone metioned µTorrent. I took a look and was amazed at the small size of the executable. Even more amazing was the claim to run on a system so much slower than mine. It looked like exactly what I had been searching for. And what do you know it IS exactly what I wanted. The best part wasn't even the client itself though. The best part was the Forums and the posters that enabled me to quickly learn how to get µTorrent set up in the best way for my system.

Thank you everyone for making this the Best Software I've used this year!

-The ANT

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Too bad there is no title bar on this board system, or it would have been titled "My Search for a Usable Torrent Client"

From an ex-user of many different torrent clients.

Prologue

I discovered BitTorrent thanks to Underdogs.org, a site which specializes in maintaining archives of stopped games (technically illegal, but no one seems to be suing them...) They started mentioning switching to "BitTorrent" based systems. I decided to get onto the BitTorrent website they are linking to. But I didn't yet discover how torrents are everywhere and thought that there was nothing I might want to get from it, so I kept it on the back burner.

Of course, the day came when the only way I could get something I wanted was on ... a torrent. Head back to site, downloaded that minimalist official client (forgot what version it was all the way back then).

Back then, my Torrents suffered from a horrible condition - it will keep kicking off my WLAN connection. After a certain number of such disconnects, the WLAN would refuse to reconnect at all - restart. This is not only annoying, it kills the idea of automatic downloading. Each time I'm forced to restart, the official client goes and checks all my pieces, one by one before resuming. Seeing by then I've noticed that there are 4GB torrents out there. Obviously, when I have to recheck when it is 3.9GB done, it would be a nightmare...

I asked around, went to BitTornado. My connections still kept kicking off, and as far as I can tell, BitTornado at the time also has no provision for skipping rechecks. It had a few more features but as far as I can tell it is very minimalist.

Those two clients took up about 3 days of my now year long BitTorrent using life.

BitSpirit

Someone recommended BitSpirit. Downloaded it. This was a much heftier client, and the first one I used with a lot of features and setups. I set it up according to the book and started. I practically cried with glee when I realized that it had a "Skip recheck" provision. It didn't solve my disconnection problems, but I swear it was a little less acute, and "skip recheck" minimizes the inconvenience.

Eventually, I realized the only way to stop all the disconnections is to go to wired LAN connections. It wasn't that convenient in my old flat, but my new flat allowed my LAN/WLAN hub to be right next to my computer, and so I now just plug a hard line. Everything seemed to work better on hard line anyway.

Now, BitSpirit, at least on the user level, wasn't bad (at the time, "cheating" clients are totally unknown to me even in a theoretical sense). It had a fake peer function, bandwidth usage regulation, part download capability ... etc. It was about at the time when I realized some clients don't like each other, or maybe trackers don't like some clients (or else why have the faking function). I leave that one on BitSpirit most of the time (don't lie when you don't have to), and if that doesn't seem to work well I'd try pretending to be "BitTorrent" (if we are going to fake, faking to be the official client seems to be a safe bet).

It wasn't slow too. I had 300KB/s level download rates on BitTorrent less than 10 times in my life, and those don't last long. I think 60% of them were on BitSpirit. But then, I used BitSpirit for 6 months of my now year long BitTorrent using life. Of course, it had its crawls too, but that happened to me with every client so I'm not exactly complaining.

Azureus

I eventually left BitSpirit for a few reasons. For one thing, BitSpirit is the first time I realized that clients have a nasty tendency to demand everything on your computer and then some. Even stopping all the torrents and leaving it up is a measurable drag. I swear I can still feel it from Windows rot AFTER I quit the program - the only way to get out of its shadow is to restart. Besides, one doesn't dare stop connections on a weak torrent for fear they'd never get it back.

They are lucky that they aren't selling this. They promised us low CPU and low memory usage. If they were selling this stuff, they would sued into backruptcy, I swear, for Fraud...

Then I noticed that BitSpirit seemed to have problems digesting some new torrents that are coming out.

I remember someone recommending Azureus back then. I also can see my peer lists and realize that a h*ll of a lot of people (most) were using Azureus. Well, that many people can't be all wrong, eh? I think they were up to about 2.3.0.4 (they were at that for months) when I downloaded.

The hardest thing with Azureus is agonizing over the upload slots. It was the first time I had to set my upload slots manually, and I constantly agonized between sending more to fewer peers and less to more peers - which one would get me better returns?

Azureus, as some others have attested, is a computer killer. I think it is a bit better than BitSpirit but that's like saying a tortoise is faster than a snail. Still, it was popular and functional, and I suffered with it for 3 months.

BitComet

My first experience with BitComet was with version 0.60, and I was forced into it.

By then, I already knew that BitComet had something of a bad rep - it is not awfully generous in giving out to other clients. As far as my limited observational ability could tell, this part at least seems likely.

Still, one day Azureus' was very slow in getting flow on a weak torrent (so far I've been sticking to strong torrents with at least a dozen seeds). I notice that it is completely dominated by BitComet users.

I wanted that file. I went to BitComet's site to see what they have to offer.

They swore that they had fixed the bugs that were giving BitComet a bad rep in their boards. Besides, I can't care less at this point. I think BitComet wasn't going to screw its own users. I downloaded and installed BitComet. The theory worked superficially - I soon got flow and managed to complete the file.

Azureus had DHT, but I used strong torrents on it. BitComet also marked my foray into downloading rare, weak torrents with 1-5 seeds and maybe 10-20 peers. The trackers used for them were utterly unreliable (10 trackers listed; lucky if one works). That was when I really realized DHT was God's gift to BitTorrent... For some reason, all these weak torrents are dominated (or even monopolized) by BitComet users. Virtually all my weak torrents had been completed partially or completely with BitComet. I don't really care if it cheats - getting the file has a higher prioritization. Besides, as I said, everyone on those torrents are BitComet guys, so it isn't like it doesn't even out.

I then realized that I can still work on my computer with BitComet downloading. Imagine my ecstasy. I also noticed that at least I was uploading to some Azureus guys (according to the program). Maybe they did fix the "cheat' problems after all?

The final real plus is that the upload slot thing was automated.

uTorrent

Several weak torrents later, ironically, BitComet's forums introduced me to uTorrent. Their comments on it weren't so great, particularly the buggy part. I can survive a lot of things, but not a buggy automatic downloading system. The last thing I need is my files coming out corrupted.

Still, it was only a 105KB download at the time. To be generous to it, I waited for a strong torrent that I wanted.

Overall, my experience with uTorrent was good, but it isn't as uncheckered as the average seems to be here. The first thing I noticed is that it is a slow starter. Definitely. It takes much longer to get connections and work up to speed. Still, if it can get up to speed it wasn't slow, and with strong torrents I can wait a little for it.

Its real selling point is that it is indeed "small". For all of everyone elses promises of being easy on CPU and memory:

1) I can't do anything on BitSpirit even with a single file up.

2) With Azureus I can do something in an emergency if I set its Priority to Low (in the Task Manager) and download only a single file - I wait 5 minutes per move; really an emergency procedure only.

3) With BitComet I can get into my word processing program and type, but it is definitely there.

4) With uTorrent I can play GAMES involving 3D models (OK, it is a sub simulation and not fast moving like a fighter game, but it is a rather complicated program, and my video card isn't that great).

This greatly increases the amount of time I can leave it up, and more than compensates for it being a bit slow. I resolved to use it on strong torrents.

A few days later came the time I had a weak torrent for a test. The results are really rather disappointing. It was extremely slow to connect and unwilling to get flow after connecting. I sighed and turned on BitComet...

This was about when I developed my little workaround of priming. The weakest time of any torrent in my experience is when you are just starting, with no peerlist and nothing to trade with. By using a strong downloader like BitComet to prime the torrent and get a few pieces of trading data, I can switch to uTorrent. Maybe if I waited two hours uTorrent would have gotten something, but why wait when I can use those two hours to prime the torrent.

uTorrent also can't see in DHT nearly as well as either BitComet or Azureus in my experience (I now know they use different DHT systems). The workaround allows me to see what Azureus (especially) can get and write down all their IPs for manual transfer (Yes, I type as many as dozens of IPs).

Version 1.3 was a disaster and should never, IMO, have been allowed to make it out as a non-Beta, or even as a Beta. By the time you are up to Version 1.3, your software should have been pretty much debugged. Any beta over Version 1.3, at most, minor, noncritical flaws on your new features. In any case, this is not even a beta. Even though the fix came quickly, it was the only client I EVER used with a fatal flaw which threatened the integrity of my files during partial downloads. And it persisted after I turned off Sparse Files and Compact Allocation - I downgraded to very conservative settings and the thing still went corrupt on me.

Do I have to mention how important simple Reliability is in the eyes of the average person.

Right now, the new betas have no critical flaw I can detect, but it still isn't quite clean. The new anti-Standby function still doesn't work the last time I tried it and a new bug sprang up where if I activate the automatic Monitor Power Management functions and activate/deactivate my trackpad while uTorrent is running, it does some funny flickers. Still, they aren't critical, and these ARE betas (albeit a beta one has to use to avoid critical flaws in the official version), so I'd with-hold judgment until Version 1.4 comes out.

Right now, uTorrent is my favorite client. It ain't perfect as my lengthy review up there as mentioned, but it still is very good and has a lot of potential. Besides, it has the 2nd most critical aspect for me besides basic reliability (as of latest beta and all other versions sans 1.3) - low resource consumption, and that alone can make it the best thing I used.

APPEND 10-Jan-2006: This new guy Talay has reminded me to put in my testimonial some praise for how well Partial Allocation works in the newest betas of uTorrent. The NTFS Sparse File +PartFile allocation method is dramatically superior to the "Incremental" method in Azureus and whatever method is used in BitComet. Unlike them, there is virtually no wasted space with uTorrent - if you downloaded 4 pieces totalling 1MB, that's exactly how much room the file would take. This is not the case with any of the others.

APPEND 27-Jan-2006: I just found out today that they hadn't managed to fix the issues with Compact Allocation after all. All I can say is use SparseFiles+PartFile...

UPDATE 30-Jan-2006:

Newest features are Protocol Encryption (compatible with a future Azureus), a read cache, long path support, and peer exchange! Test it out and help make sure it works right.

BC and Az users must be getting jealous. I remember catching onto the uTorrent bandwagon sometime between Ver 1.2.2 and the first betas leading to 1.3 (cough, cough), which means I must have gotten it just a few days at most after Nov 25 given the speed Ludde moves.

I also remember posts about how Ludde doesn't seem to think PeX is a high priority. Now, we finally have a perspective - just 2 months and 5 days (+/-1 day) after DHT, we get PeX, and Protocol Encryption (I don't need it right now, but I know there are people that do). Oh, so this is the response time for low priority... I see... it won't be very long before Ludde cracks Azureus DHT now... not very long to anybody except uTorrent users, who are being spoiled to expect updates 2-3 times a week, if not more.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Im a Bitcomet user before and now fully switched to utorrent. Utorrent maximize my download speed as well as my upload speed. I was a leecher before because Bitcomet cant maximize my upload speed even if i stay online for a long time. Utorrent is a very small program yet very powerful unlike other bittorent clients ive tried before they slow down my system. Its also amazing that utorrent has a speed test which configure itself for its best performance that other bittorrent clients doesnt have.

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never been interested in using ptp bittorrent or similar stuff.

now an important service offered a download of interesting stuff ONLY via utorrent.

okay. downloaded, installated, getting error when testing port, some look-around,

reading FRITZ! hints, creating a special port, testing,

OKAY! and now downloading since 3:08 and for est. 9 hrs.

If my wife would be such a simple thing...

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I like so many other noob torrenteers started with BitCommet wooed by (supposed) Speed and hype.

After moving almost completely to a portable Dirve (O.S. Not Included) i needed something lighter, to download OOo with while on the road or at clients (to save their poor servers). Enter µtorrent. I must admit while i am at a client i almost never seed once i am done (due to time) but I do have the torrent seeding from my main coputer (also running µtorrent).

After using it awhile i noticed that while downloading, my u:d ratio was horrible but with the help of µtorrent itself and inspiration from the community i am now seeding many torrents to help 1) get my ratio up to at least 2, and 2) repent for using the grab n' go methodology of a BitCommet user.

I thank you all for showing me the path to being a better torrenteer.

-InvisoSniper

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ex bitcomet/azureus user

at first, i went with what was the most "popular" client, bitcomet, but it the speeds were horrible (used a year ago). then i made the switch to azureus but it was a cpu hog and kept making my computer go through the "blue screen of death" on a total of 23 times. i got tired of it after trying to find solution but not succeeding. then i heard about utorrent in a magazine. i made the switch and was amazed at the complete simplicity of the program. i didnt even need to install it! the file was so small to download and it was barely noticeable when i checked my running proceesses in the task manager. i was amazed! it got the same speeds as azureus, but was cleaner and never, to this day (had for about 2 months) given me the dreaded "blue screen of death" problem. my computer was happy, and my downloads were happy, and that makes a very happy utorrent user ! :)

great job utorrent creators, keep up the great work, this is the ONLY client i will use.

sharkbait

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ex bittornado sufferer

I've used tornado ever since I started mainly because it was simple fast and I hardly ever had more than two torrents going at the same time. But it used upto 30mb of memory for each torrent and updates stopped in oct last year. So I looked about for a little while and decided bitcomet was for leeches, azureus was a bit system hungry and bitlord was a joke!

On a forum someone mentioned utorrent and I thought what the hell!

I haven't looked back since, it's easy to use and uses next to no resources. And the updates are coming thick and fast. I appreciate the work thats gone into utorrent and can only see it getting better.

Cheers Mr P :D

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Holy crap Kazuaki, that was a nice write-up! Great read. :D

My testimonial is a little different. I started with the Official, just like everyone else (I think...), but quickly moved to Shad0w's client. Then I moved to ABC when I got sick of every torrent taking an instance of the client. From ABC I experimented with BitComet but quickly gave that up (couldn't stand the interface) and moved to... you guessed it... Azureus.

Azureus was like God to bittorrent. It had all kinds of options and features... so many I could no longer let anyone use anything BUT Azureus. I preached it everywhere, and worked like crazy to get people switched from BitComet (the well-defended but shitty client) and the others (which were too small and functionless for people to defend). It had a ton of features and there were very few torrents I couldn't complete. I even completed a 600mb game torrent on Azureus over hotel dialup over the course of a few weeks.

A lot of the time, Azureus ran on my 850MHz laptop with 256mb RAM. If I didn't have the swap file enabled, I could only run Azureus and... well... Azureus. So I almost always had my ugly damn swap file turned on to have enough RAM to contain this beast. CPU usage was only a problem when it was rechecking files. Later, I started using my desktop with (now) 640MB RAM, mainly because my laptop fell apart (it can't even be used as a laptop anymore...). But with 640mb RAM it was very comfortable to leave the swap disabled all the time and run on pure RAM. Except when Azureus was running.

Azureus used to be a small program. It almost seemed like it was a compiled, optimized C++ program running under a Java fake cover. But with every new release and every "fix" or half-feature, its memory usage grew... and grew... and grew.

In the clients list, one day I saw a few clients with some string of gibberish... it didn't say µTorrent/1400 like it does now, it said something like @#$%*fbdeabutorrent1200@#. I don't rightly remember, but somehow I picked out that it was "utorrent". I found the µTorrent page, but didn't give two thoughts about it and comfortably went back to Azureus. Later, when it showed up as µTorrent, I gave that second thought and figured, what the hell, why not give it a try?

I downloaded it and ran it from the download temp folder (not knowing it wouldn't install itself) and instead of an installer, I saw a HUGE interface that just made my jaw hit the floor. Of course my head was scrambled as to how to un-do having it installed in my temp folder (with the desktop shortcut now pointing there) and thinking about how awesome this new program is... but I tried it out, I loaded all of Azureus' old torrents into it, pointed them to the right folders, and let it do its work.

The first thing that amazed me was that my CPU was barely even noticing that it was doing hash checking. The USB drives were cranking out maximum bandwidth (I'd never seen them reading that fast) and the internal-drive-loaded torrents were reading at like 40MB/s. It was a stunning sight. Immediately, I was hooked.

In Azureus, I had a "keepalive" set of rules set up to where when a torrent had less than 2 seeds, run constantly; if a torrent had more than 2 seeds and 1 peer, stop. I ran my "completed and ratio OK" torrents like this, and put my "still need to run" torrents on always-on mode. Unfortunately there was no such function in µTorrent... I'm still hoping to see this type of "queue rules" functionality in µTorrent eventually...

µTorrent was also happy with the way I made hardlinked files on the drive to seed to multiple sites with similar data. That was a great way to save space on my drive and still be active on multiple private trackers. It worked great.

In my later reformat/reinstall, Java wasn't even installed.

I'm permanently hooked on µTorrent. :D

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just have to say THANK YOU EXTREMLY to the devs of uTorrent.

It is a wonderful feature rich program that runs on my couple year old computer much better then azureus. While Azureus is great, its just not for me.

This is the only program I know that develops fast and there is a new release often. I can accually see the changes in it, and they are all of considerable importance, and make torrenting much easier, better, and more conveinent. All with only taking up 10MB RAM.

I also am awaiting a linux port, and again thanks alot for making this great program.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

wow, lots of change, i would like to change too, but rite now i am having probems with this utorrent. see, i would start it and then when i close it, and open it again, it would not load my recent torrents!!!! this is frustrating cause i dont know what files have been downloaded and what have not. is there any way to load these torrents automatically

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've been using BitComet from the start, and I'm very satisfied with it til one torrent wont finish up downloading, I even tried downloading using morpheus ( still wont dl ), so I asked Google " the best torrent client " * poof * uTorrent on #1. I Intalled it... WOW! Less than a minute to install !! Even LOUDER WOW !! 4m ETA !?!... bye bye BitComet

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