Today I finally got around to updating BitComet. In addition to looking a lot more snazzy (and, ironically, rather BitLordish), version .93 has a scheduler. I probably won’t use it, though, as I make it a habit to start up PeerGuardian before running BC. PeerGuardian doesn’t have a scheduler, though, and I refuse to set it to start up when Windows starts. The update also changed some of my settings and the site that I use to base them on is currently down. Has anyone else noticed an increase in sites temporarily not being available?

Anyway. To celebrate the upgrade I decided to get an account with a BitTorrent tracker site. I often have files that I want to share with others. I opted for “The Pirate Bay”. It seemed appropriate what with my Oliverette roots. Unfortunately, I discovered when creating a torrent file using BitComet, that BC adds a crap load of “padding”. I mean, the twelve files I wanted to share became 33 by the time BC was done creating the torrent file. Fuck!

I’ve been noticing that a good many of the folks who are “torrenting” with me use ?Torrent. This may be because my favorite file sharer uses Demoniod.com, who advocates ?Torrent, for their tracker, but I decided to give the client a try, anyway. I like the fact that it gives us dummies the option to automatically create settings based on our internet connections. I’m going to run it with the suggested settings for a bit and see if things speed up (Gods know when I tweaked my settings on BC to accomodate my now slower connection, things started taking twice as long). It took me a bit to figure out that I needed to create folders for the torrents and the downloads. Once I got that figured out, it became a cake walk. I even created an extra folder for my completed downloads to be automatically moved to so that I don’t mix them up with the incomplete ones!

I’m keeping BitComet at least until I finish uploading my share of the files I’ve already downloaded. Once those are done than I’ll start uploading torrents to “The Pirate Bay” and share the link to my account. ?Torrent has been set up as the default client now, so any new files will be handled by it. We’ll see how stable it is before I give BC the boot.