Internet downloads

Aside from the peer-to-peer (P2P) clients themselves, there are a host of tools you’ll likely find useful when you’re downloading from P2P networks. There are tools that create a virtual sandbox, block suspect IP addresses, access your P2P client remotely, stream video and audio, protect against viruses and more. Here’s our pick of the five best P2P helper tools.

Last month we talked about some of the cool new features of µTorrent 3.0 (www.utorrent.com), the latest version of the popular BitTorrent file-sharing app. But one that we didn’t mention was µTorrent Remote, an excellent new feature for managing your µTorrent client remotely. With Remote, you can add torrents, control speed settings and start and stop downloads from anywhere, just as if you’re sitting in front of the computer itself.

With µTorrent 3.0 now released (from www.utorrent.com), here we'll look at a few of a favourite new features in this latest version of the popular BitTorrent client. Top of the list is the ‘Drop files to send’ box, which makes sharing your own files using µTorrent much, much easier. You can literally just drag a file from Windows Explorer onto the box and it will automatically start seeding it for you and create a URL that you can send to anybody you want to have the file. It’s an excellent way to quickly share large files with friends and family.

Like Napster and LimeWire before it, BitTorrent has something of an Achilles heel. For the most part, the BitTorrent ecosystem relies on centralised servers. That includes web sites that post torrents and the trackers that manage BitTorrent connections. These sites can go down for a number of reasons: legal action, ISP or government filtering, technical faults and bandwidth issues. Tribler aims to solve this problem by offering some advanced tools for sharing data as well as torrent metadata, making it a truly decentralised BitTorrent client.

Everyone who uses the internet ends up accessing a PDF document at some point. If you visit a site such as an airline, which offers documents in PDF format, it will almost invariably tell you that you need a copy of Adobe Reader to view or print it. That isn’t strictly true. In fact, Adobe Reader has a number of disadvanges, which we'll explain later. Fortunately, there are many alternative PDF readers, such as the free Nitro PDF Reader (www.nitroreader.com), which lets you read and edit PDF documents plus a lot more.