µTorrent
After four months of total silence, I've decided to finally write something. I even forgot that I had Wordpress installed until I noticed it in the package list on one of my FreeBSD servers.
Anyways, in September I discovered a new BitTorrent client called µTorrent. I was currently using Azureus and I think that it's pretty well known that Azureus was and still is a big resource hog because of the Java Runtime Environment so µTorrent was a new experience for me.
I replaced Azureus after only a few days of testing. The first version I tried was 1.1 and I was totally amazed by the low resource usage. It was clearly a result of efficient programming, and this proved to be correct in the following versions.
I tried alot of clients before I settled with Azureus, and eventually µTorrent. Here's the list:
None of these clients has all the necessary features and a low footprint. These clients either sacrifice features and usability to get a lower footprint (Arctic Torrent) or they have a sh*tload of features and a large footprint. µTorrent provides, more or less, the necessary features of Azureus minus the bloat and the Java requirement.
The "installation" of µTorrent is quite easy, you download a single exe-file (utorrent.exe) and put it wherever you want. The first time you launch it, µTorrent will ask you if you want shortcuts on the start-menu and on the desktop.
µTorrent stores all of it's settings and active torrents in
%APPDATA%\uTorrent so that they can easily be backed up. %APPDATA% is an
enviromental variable in Windows and refers to the C:\Documents and
Settings\[username]\Application Data folder. As of 1.2 you can also customize
the main icon, the tray icon and the toolbar of µTorrent. This done by putting
a main.ico, tray.ico, toolbar.bmp and tstatus.bmp in %APPDATA%\uTorrent.