One of the fundamental choices you’ll need to make before you start downloading torrents (as well as where you’ll download your .torrent files from) is deciding what client you’re going to use.

Opera

In many ways, Opera is the easiest BitTorrent client for most beginners. Opera is primarily a web-browser, with a built in torrent client. This means that it has the capacity to download torrents as easily as you might otherwise download a single file.

While there are extensions available for Firefox that specifically allow it to download torrents, the fact that Opera comes with one enabled on install means it’s quicker and easier to work with. It’s also a fine browser in its own right; the “speed dial” function offers nine favourite sites in one panel whenever a new tab is opened… which makes downloads that bit more convenient.

The only issue with Opera is that its torrent client is comparatively basic; if you want any more complex information on what you’re downloading, where it’s coming from etc. you’re far better off using a dedicated application such as those suggested below.

You can download Opera, here.

Azureus

Another attractive client is the java-based Azureus. Its interface is simple and fairly easy to navigate for beginners, which is an advantage. Perhaps the biggest benefit of a fresh Azureus install is the ability to open individual completed files from a download that has yet to finish (an indispensable trait when dealing with low numbers of seeds or particularly big downloads).

If you’re wondering why I said a “fresh” Azureus install it’s because (being Java based) there are a host of optional “plugins” available. The most useful of these are Ono, which finds peers closer (geographically) to the downloader in an effort to increase download speed; and Auto Speed, which monitors network latency and adjusts upload speeds accordingly. RSS aggregators are also available for those with a need to keep up to date.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there are less functional (but still handy) plugins. The obviously named Sudoku and Chat plugins offer puzzles (in the popular Japanese logic-game style) and chat between users respectively. There’s a variety of eclectic plugins ranging from the everyday useful to the… well, Sudoku, available for download here[http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_list.php].

The biggest issue I’ve found with Azureus though is that (and this might be linked to its Java-based development) it tends to slow down, not in download speed but the program itself seems to consume a spiralling amount of resources over time regardless of use. If you find the same, I’d advise another client; it’s just not worth the headaches it causes in the long run if you have to restart your computer every few hours whilst using it.

You can download Azureus, here.

µTorrent

µTorrent bills itself as “A (very) Tiny Bittorrent client”; and weighing in at around 170KB for the client itself it’s hard to fault that claim.

While µTorrent lacks some of the more complex features of competitors like Azureus and can’t really compete with the convenience of Opera’s in-browser downloading, it has developed a fantastic reputation for entirely different reasons.

µTorrent is famous not only for its small size, but for the fact that, as a rule, it uses so little memory as to be practically negligible on most PCs. This means that, given its miniscule size and its ability to open quietly in the system tray on startup, µTorrent lets most users continue about their day-to-day computing whilst downloading torrents.

Furthermore, on requesting a download µTorrent’s first response is to show a full list of the files contained in that download, allowing users to elect which to download and which to leave. This means that, without any tedious menu-searching, if you’re looking for one very specific file within a larger torrent package, you can choose to download that file alone and leave the rest of the torrent untouched.

The other point in µTorrent’s favour is that it tends (in my experience at least) to download at a quicker pace than the majority of bittorrent clients available, and without Azureus’ tendency to eat up memory.

You can download µTorrent, here.

Another favourite Torrent client is BitComet. There’s little enough to distinguish BitComet from those we’re already discussed apart from its ease of customisability so we’ve included a little more on that later.