general question by newbie

[markw1947]

This is my first experience with P2P. There is so much to read and understand.

I got a basic understanding but figured that I would have to just jump and try it and hhopefully learn as I go. So I d/led utorrent yesterday. I went to torrentHound and initiated a d/l on two movies. It was slow, but seemed to be going well so, I went to bed. I am back at the computer now and found that one of the movies d/led just fine but the other stopped after 60% due to some error. OK fine. But I see now that I am still online and have many peers currently using my computer. I don't mind but I am going on a trip and would like to be able to stop access to my computer while I am gone.

Two questions: once you start using utorrent does your computer stay permanently connected and open for use by others? If so, how do I temporarily prevent access to my computer while I am gone for the weekend? Thanks.

[jewelisheaven]

Stop the torrents in uT, or close uT.

That's all you need to do. To check out more info on uT, the User Manual is useful http://download.utorrent.com/utorrent-help.zip and for more on bittorrent (what it is you're using when running uT) checking out http://btfaq.com/#what should help. The http://utorrent.com/guides.php page is useful as well for general guides, and the forum stickies here include more specific guides.

[markw1947]

Thanks for the quick reply my friend. I will go to the links that you posted for me and start the learning process. Now that I have an initial experience with the process, the words that I read will make more sense.

One last question. I closed the utorrent window by clicking on the red X in the upper right corner. I waited a few seconds and then opened utorrent again from my shortcut to confirm that there were no more peers connected. But I could see that there were still 5 or 6 peers d/ling. So I went to file, right clicked to see exit. I clicked there and was asked by a prompt window if I was sure. I clicked on yes and exited utorrent. I waited for a few minutes and opened utorrent again to dble ck. Indeed there were no peers listed but within a few seconds, I had 5 peers connected and d/ling. So I figure that immediate access to my computer by other utorrent peers when I open utorrent is a default config. Is this true and just part of the system?

Thanks again,

M

[jewelisheaven]

Indeed. As long as you REconnect within a certain interval, the peers you were connected to before are able to connect again quickly. If you say close, or stop uT for overnight, a day, or as you say the weekend, it will take longer for them to connect to you as you'll be a "NEW" peer they didn't know about before. What's happening now is you're in their peer cache. And as the cache works they don't need to wait to "announce" to the tracker to get your connection information.

[markw1947]

And a couple of last quick questions, hopefully:

If a movie d/ls 60% or so and then stops due to some error, is it usually possible to

reconnect to the search engine and pick up where you left off? Or does that depend on what kind of error caused the d/l to stop?

I just randomly selected torrentHound as a search engine last night. But I find that upon closer examination I was apparently redirected to fulldls.com It seems that some search engines are more efficient than others, have more torrents than others and can be trusted to be safer to d/l from than others regarding the sneaking in of malware. Do the utorrent users have a few favorite search engines? And are Adult movies usually as safe to d/l as non-adult?

I have NortonIS 2008 and Spyblaster currently protecting my computer.

And thanks you once more Jewel......

[jewelisheaven]

You don't need to search for anything after you LOAD the torrent into uT (you see it in the list). There can be problems RESUMING from where you left off depending upon the error yes. It's all situational, if you've got a problem start with the Manual http://download.utorrent.com/utorrent-help.zip see if it covers it, if not search for the error message on the forum "error invalid state try resuming", and finally ask on the forum

Quite welcome, sorry about the late reply. Had some ISP issues that hiccuped along.

[Lord Alderaan]

You can also use the µtorrent search box. In the top right you can enter the name of something you would like to download and press enter and µtorrent will start a browser window and search for torrents by that name on a popular site.

Also note that while µtorrent is running other people only download pieces of torrents you have listed in µtorrent. So you don't provide anyone 'access to your computer' in the common definition of the term. Remember that you can download (faster) because other people just like you leave torrents running. It is considered fair (but not required!) if you can give back to the world a bit of your upload especially if it is unused anyway.

The most common measuring of fairness is to look at the ratio of a file. If a torrent has a ratio of 1 it means you have given exactly as much as you have taken. More then 1 means you have been generous In any case if you are away for a few days the upload of your connection probably isn't used at all and it would be ideal to leave µtorrent running unless you prefer to power down your machine while you are away.

[RoyalShrubber]

>If a movie d/ls 60% or so and then stops due to some error, is it usually possible to

reconnect to the search engine and pick up where you left off?

The reason behind a situation when you see torrent stop at some percentage is usually other people not having the rest of file you want.

So in your situation it is probable everyone had only 60% of file even when you started downloading and they only sent you what you they had (in theory a guy with 100% file could reconnect back any time (re-seed), but that never happens with older torrents).

It's wise to check torrents with not-so-new stuff that this situation is not present before you actually start wasting bandwidth.

If you see for example 4 guys with exactly 73.4% it's not likely you'll get more that this. Also pretty definitive answer to whether torrent is dead are also red parts in 'availability graph' - (though when you add new torrent you have to wait few minutes for program to find all people that have pieces of file you want).

Hope all this made any sense..

[lyndasue55]

to close utorrent click the file tab and then click exit. a dialog box will open asking if you really want to exit. click yes. you will be disconnected from utorrent and no access from anyone.