What Are Torrents?

by Imelda
(Glendale, CA)

On your page about gaming computers, you mentioned you can upgrade the router and set it up so you can give priority to games over things like torrents. What are torrents?

We use the router for 3 computers, my sons use it for World of Warcraft and I use it for work (Internet access). If we upgrade to a gaming router, will my Internet access be affected? Or can we satisfy both needs, gaming and working?

Thanks for your site and for any help you can give me on this.

Answer


To your first question. Torrents are small files that contain information to download a larger file, including location. You can get just about anything from torrents. To find the torrents, you use a torrent search engine, much like you use Google.

To answer your question about getting a gaming router, since you already have a router, I would recommend a program called Cfosspeed. The best part is, it's got a free trial. This way you can see if it does exactly what you want it to do. Just install this little program on every computer that uses the internet. The defaults should be good, if not, customizing is very easy.

So what does this little program do. It's actually quite simple. Gaming applications really don't take a whole lot of bandwidth, they just need it NOW to make game play fun. Downloads, email, uploading pictures to Facebook, that really takes a lot of bandwidth, but it's doesn't have to be instantly. They can wait a half second between sends, and you really don't notice.

What Cfosspeed does is schedule everything that uses the internet so the information that needs to go as fast as possible goes as fast as possible. Other data, that can wait a bit, goes when nothing fast needs to go, up to the maximum bandwidth you have.

I know it sounds like something very minor. But let me assure you, when using multiple computers this will make a HUGE difference when it comes to using internet on several computers.

I have got many computers set up with Cfosspeed, it really is easy to use, and it does a great job.

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