Review of four BitTorrent client apps

[Bob Crabtree]

Peer-to-peer file sharing has a bad name because of piracy issues - and can often result in a PC becoming laden with trojans and other nasties.

However, the crafty BitTorrent way of sharing large files created by Bram Cohen has lots of legitmate uses.

It's even being aped in the video download systems used by Sky and by AOL.

Others, can be expected to use similar file-sharing technology, including the BBC when it properly starts to open its archives for downloads.

And that, by way of a cover-your-backs preamble, brings us round to pointing you at an interesting review of BitTorrent client apps carried by PCMag.

This, sensibly, does warn that P2P-downloaded files can carry unexpected and unwanted payloads.

It also includes a brief and rather unsatisfactory interview with Bram Cohen his very self.

Four client apps come under scrutiny - Azureus 2.3.0.6; BitPump 1.0; BitTorrent Client 4.2; and µTorrent 1.2.2

The review section concludes by saying:

µTorrent has the reputation of being able to run on nearly any version of Windows (users claim everything from 486 PCs running Windows 95 and the Winsock2 update up through Windows Vista beta). In the course of our testing for this story, it replaced Azureus as our BitTorrent tool of choice. Azureus-style plug-ins would be an outstanding addition, but the authors have promised this will never happen.

Check it out.

[ajbrun]

UTorrent is what I use. It's really really small (file size), and doesn't seem to skimp on any features either. Uses hardley any system resourses.

It's brilliant!

[dangel]

µTorrent - to use anything else would be madness..

[Apex]

Offical BT Client, found it more to my taste.