About torrents...
Here's a great link that explains just about everything you could ever want to know about torrent in detail. Maybe too much detail in places, but it is very informative.
http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/1.html
For those who don't feel like checking the link, or find it is too detailed, here's the basics...
Bit Torrent is a protocol for transferring files. It's basically a peer-to-peer system, meaning that users download directly from user to user. The difference from other p2p systems like Limewire, for example, is that the connections are managed by central servers called trackers that coordinate everything.
The 'torrent' basically identifies the file that is being transferred, to the tracker. You need a Torrent client, a small program, to connect to the tracker to download the files that the 'torrent' points to.
The best torrent clients are Azureus and uTorrent but they can be a bit complicated for some people to set up. The easiest client to use, for me anyways, is BitLord. It is very similar to things such as Limewire and Kazaa in it's layout and is very easy to use. You can find torrent clients on
www.download.com and there is nothing preventing you from installing and trying out more than one to find the one you like best.
To download torrents you use a search site or a forum to find what you are looking for. One of the best sites to find things is
www.torrentspy.com where you just do a search and it will post the files found. The advantage with this site is that members also leave comments about the torrent so it is quite easy to check the quality and contents of the torrent without downloading it yourself first. Forums usually require you to register before being able to have access to the torrents.
http://rockbits.proboards31.com/ and
http://www.komodoisland.net/ are great for finding music while puretna and empornium, links in my last post, are the best for porn lovers. Torrentspy is probably the best for movies and complete discographies of music artists.
When you download a torrent, you have the choice to either save it or open it as with anything you download. What you want to do is open it which will then launch your torrent client and it will start the download. It can take anywhere from a very short time to weeks to download a torrent. It depends on how many people are sharing the file and their upload speeds as well as your download speed as well as how patient you are and how badly you want the content.
As far as drawbacks are concerned...as of yet I have found none. There are no laws in Canada preventing the download of copyrighted material. Not yet at least. The benefits of torrent are many. The main one is that I have never found a virus or any other malware in a torrent file. And the quality of what you download is generally great especially when you use a site such as torrentspy where the users comment on the files or a forum where people only post quality files.
Actually there is one downside...it's really easy to run out of hard drive space.
One last tip: if you really get into downloading videos or movies, it would be a good idea to invest $50 or so in a DVD player that can play DivX files. Most of the movies are DivX encoded which decreases the file size to around 700MB for the average movie. You can burn 6 movies to a DVD and play them back on your TV this way instead of having to convert them to DVD format which takes about 2 hours, and one DVD, per movie.
If you search for movies on torrentspy, just do a search for 'axxo'. He is someone who provides high quality movie rips and all his torrents are tested to run on a DivX compatible player.
Anyways, I hope this helped and if anyone has any questions feel free to post them or PM me. I'll be more than happy to help out if I can.
Techman.