Every now and then, I find the urge to download some files, either this or that. Usually, it's some kind of TV-series that has never been shown in this small country. Often it leads to me buying the series on DVD as soon as I find it, because it is a different feeling watching the darned things from an original DVD: Better Audio, better Video, proper subtitles, and it looks cool in the bookshelf.
Before everyone jumps on the anti-piracy bandwagon here, no, we do not recommend downloading stuff you are not allowed to download.
Piracy is not the topic for this blog-entry anyways, I have something different in mind: The clients used for downloading.
I have tried several different ones, like Kazaa, Kazaa light, E-Mule / E-Donkey, Limewire, BearShare, Morpheus, BitTorrent, Azerus and uTorrent to mention some. All of these "do the same thing" but in different ways and with different degrees of efficiency.
To pick the one I think is the best one, I have gone by the following criteria:
1: I want no adware / spyware / whatever-ware
2: I want it to be gentle on my system-resources so it does not interfere with me doing other things on the computer
3: I need to see some good speeds so the downloads finish within a reasonable timeframe
4: It doesn't have to have every godforsaken MP3 in the world, 99,5% of these are of no use to me
One thing to consider right away, is which "network" or which "protocol" you should aim for. Some of these programs use the GnuTella network / protocol, while others use the more modern BitTorrent-protocol. So here is your first choice.
If what you are after is single MP3s, the GnuTella network is probably best if you wish to cover as many songs as possible. It is good for many small downloads, but I would not recommend it if you are after movies, series or other huge files.
Of these clients, I think BearShare comes with too much "crap", and Morpheus has become more and more of a strain on computer resources.
My choice here would be Limewire, which trades away a bit of speed for a lot less resources.
If you are after mostly bigger things than single MP3's, my experience tells me you should find a BitTorrent client.
It's easy enough to find the torrent-files you need too, you can just search for them on Google. Try searching for any movie or tv-series followed by "torrent" in the search-box, and voila!
There are several clients to choose from, and here the difference between the clients is HUGE!
I started out using the client called BitTorrent, thinking I was smart to use "the original client".
It's interface has changed a bit the past 18 months, but I felt I could live with the awkward look and lack of options as I was using "the original" (and thus presumably the best) client. I was SO WRONG!
BitTorrent is a MONSTER in terms of wasting system-resources. It's hunger for more and more memory became a huge problem, and soon it was impossible to do anything else with the computer while it was downloading. My advice: Don't bother!
I did try Azerus for a while too. It's java-based, so it requires the full Java Real Time package, which you can get at java.com.
It's has a better interface then BitTorrent, and uses less memory, but being Java it is more hungry for CPU. It is also marginally slower in my experience. All in all, it's ok I guess, but nothing more.
My clear and decisive winner is a tiny program called uTorrent. It is just 170K!
And the amount of system-resources it uses is very small when compared to the other clients:
As an example, I had 6 different torrents being downloaded with BitTorrent. The monster spent a staggering 399 MB of memory!
Then I switched to uTorrent....The result was shocking, memory consumption dropped to 23 MB!
And that's not all. The speed of the downloads doubled!
And if that wasn't enough of a surprise, the CPU-usage dropped to 0-1%!
So there you have it, my clear winner and choice:
(You can download it
here!)
What do YOU use? What is your experience?
