I have been using BitTornado for over 2 years. I’ve been using since my “Dial-up SuprNova” days. But of late, I pissed off a little by BitTornado and at one point I couldn’t resist trying out µTorrent when they released 1.6 (stable) version.
I was testing the waters for troubles for over a week before venturing out in the ocean. Been good till now and there’s no looking back ever since. For all these 7 days I dint even think of using BitTornado.
What made me switch to µTorrent?
- One of the strongest reason why I switched is the BitTornado was not resource friendly (atleast better than Azureus) and added to that sometimes the process still runs even though I have closed the application. We’ll have to manually end the process. It takes only about 5 mb whereas BitTornado used to take 20-23mb or even more. That’s a high amount for my old PC.
- We can’t run multiple torrent in a single process. It’s ok to use BitTornado if we use only Private Trackers, but most of the times you’ll have full BW speeds if you run Public Tracker torrents. So incase you want to run more than 1 torrent, the more resource it’s gonna take.
- Another good reason which made me switch is whenever my connection disconnects or the power goes kaput or any other reason when BitTornado had to restart, then it “Check for existing data” and some data is lost, that is, if I happened to leech 100 MB previously, after checking it might show only 80 MB.
It was irritating when you have limited capped connection. Sometimes it checks even when you have paused the torrent before closing BitTornado.
- DHT Support. We can get more peers and logically faster speeds. But of course this feature will be irrelevant incase of Private Trackers
- Great for selective files upload/download. BitTornado has got problems with selective downloading, sometimes it’ll show error, in case it tries to download files that we wanted to skip. And partial upload is not possible (in older versions only and new versions got some bugs that needs to be fixed)
- Fancy features! I like to see more stats while leeching a copy. The one that I like is the Graph of the download/upload speed. The other feature that I like is that we can know what piece utorrent is downloading and also the total pieces (and the location) information.
- Visually appealing and Skinnable. It looks better than BitTornado. We can change the icon, toolbar graphic and status icon.
- Actively Developed and Improved. The bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed. The fact that this program is still new compared to other clients and they are improving.
There are problems too…
Using utorrent was also not a smooth ride altogether.
- Speeds are not fast enough. I can only leech around 90 MB in an hour. With BitTornado, I used to leech 95-100+ MB in an hour.
- Still I feel it’s not suitable for capped connections (like D1), so if you limit your upload speed, then your download speeds take the brunt. I cap my upload speed to 5 KBps (My max is only 6 KBps) and it limits my download speed to 30 KBps
- Even it take some time to get to the optimum speeds but anyway it’s getting better on this front.
- I think we can’t allocate particular BW for a particular torrent. That is if I have 3 torrents running and I want to allocate 60% of my BW to torrent 1 and rest shared between torrents 2 & 3.
We have the BW allocation option but that is crap. We can only set : ‘High’ , ‘Normal’ or ‘Low’. And 90% of the times, it doesn’t work for me. - µTorrent preallocated the disk space in our HDD, so people like me having less space on the HDD, it’s not good. If the file size is 900 MB and I have around 600 MB only in the HDD, then it’s a problem to leech as much as we want (or till we have space). It asks if we want to go ahead with the leeching, but still it’s bad for people like me.
- It hangs when I try to remove some torrents from list. It happens when I don’t “Stop” it. Even when I “Pause” the torrent and try to remove it, it hangs.
As you can see both the clients are not perfect. But weighting the options that I have and compromising a few for the greater good, I found µTorrent (just) better.
This post is dedicated to BitTornado which I bid a emotional adieu. BitTornado is a great client. I’ll recommend it to any newbies in the p2p world. But it’s time that I moved to bigger (and better) things. So long, BitTornado!
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