uTorrent alternative?

T

The549

Regular
Looks like utorrent is trying to sneak Conduit onto your system by appearing as the license agreement.

Upon googling it sounds like it can hijack ie or ff and be difficult to remove (roll back ie); that it overall tries to pass as a cool "app addon", but in reality, returning commercial results and uninstallation issues sound more like adware, 'legal' or not.

I have a terrible slow connection so use bittorrent as much as possible. What are you bittorrent suggestions?
 
Why are you installing utorrent? Get the utorrent.exe, put it in its own folder, create a settings.dat file there and there you go.

Conduit is installed when the utorrent browser toolbar is installed. Get rid of the toolbar.
 
Bludd said:
Why are you installing utorrent? Get the utorrent.exe, put it in its own folder, create a settings.dat file there and there you go.
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I had no idea what this conduit thing is so I googled a bit to inform myself, and it would seem many people were silently infested with this scumware after letting utorrent autoupdate itself. There was no warning or choice involved, the stuff was just unloaded on their systems.

Even when a choice was given (in the form of checkboxes, which were unchecked to show the user did not want the toolbar) was that choice respected by utorrent. :( Those reports were from december of last year though, and maybe that was a legitimate bug which has been fixed since. I'm not acting guinea pig to find out though...

Conduit is installed when the utorrent browser toolbar is installed. Get rid of the toolbar.
Click to expand...
It would also seem, from my googling efforts, that the toolbar resists being uninstalled (as in, not actually uninstalling when running the uninstaller.) So the best thing would be to avoid utorrent entirely...

Too bad. It WAS a nice program, I was thinking of grabbing a BT client after not having had one installed for years and utorrent has been what I used last time. Not any more after this though. Sad when a company destroys itself and its reputation like this.
 
I just installed utorrent 3.0 alpha (the 64-bit version) and it did not ask me to install any toolbar (nor did it install anything extra).
 
Have been letting uTorrent auto update for years now, and no toolbar. Not sure what's going on with those that are getting it.

Regards,
SB
 
Yeah at home i've auto updated with no problem. I've been downloading fake factory for hl2 for....oh, almost three days now at home (I mean, if i want to surf or watch a daily show or play a game, I have to pause...). At work I have a fast connection...multitasking, filling out forms and downloading whatever uttorrent installer from the site did it. It's not affecting chrome, but I'll probably have to figure out a way to remove it.
 
It's probably one of those options that is auto checked like google toolbar or yahoo toolbar in so many free programs these days. It's annoying that I have to unchecked it everytime. It's optional so leave the freaking thing unchecked unless I want to check it.
 
Huh, strange. Been using uTorrent for many years now, and never noticed this. I've always been very careful *not* to install any browser bars, however, as so many freeware/shareware apps come with them these days. So maybe I just noticed and unchecked the box. It does tempt me to uninstall it, but I'm so used to the program!
 
BRiT said:
Have a look at Transmission.
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While in principle this would be fantastic, because it's an open source project that is highly unlikely to go for any sort of adware or malware, it doesn't seem to support RSS feeds, which is the main thing I use uTorrent for these days. I do know that the torrent programs I have in Linux do support that, though, so I guess I'll have to look into that...

Edit: Okay, the torrent program I use in Linux that supports RSS feeds is KTorrent. It looks like the way to install this is to install KDE for Windows:
http://windows.kde.org/

It includes a lot of other apps as well (optional, except for the any required shared libraries, which are installed automatically), but is a bit of a hassle to install. Ktorrent is included in the 4.3.4 KDE release, but seems to have been removed from more recent versions of KDE for Windows (the earlier versions don't appear to be available from all of the mirrors, but were on www.winkde.org).
 
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I really liked deluge.

But now i'm back on uTorrent because of that cute map app where it tries to locate all the peers :D
 
Chalnoth said:
http://windows.kde.org/

It includes a lot of other apps as well (optional, except for the any required shared libraries, which are installed automatically), but is a bit of a hassle to install. Ktorrent is included in the 4.3.4 KDE release, but seems to have been removed from more recent versions of KDE for Windows (the earlier versions don't appear to be available from all of the mirrors, but were on www.winkde.org).
Click to expand...

Off topic a bit. But that's interesting. Is it basically an intiative to try to allow Linux applications to run in Windows? I avoid Linux like the plague as I don't have the time to dick around with it, but there are some Linux applications I wouldn't mind trying out if it didn't involve the hassle of installing/learning/troubleshooting Linux.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Off topic a bit. But that's interesting. Is it basically an intiative to try to allow Linux applications to run in Windows?
Click to expand...
Not quite. These are native ports of some (most) apps that make up KDE desktop environment. Not all of them work as well on Windows as they do in Linux but for most part they are at least usable. I haven't tried it for quite a while myself but I did run Amarok as my main music player for a while when I was forced to use Windows. KTorrent is also an awesome torrent application, though it can get a bit resource-hungry at times. It also seemed to not handle >15MB/s and >500 simultaneous downloads for a single torrent all that well. Anything less than that worked perfectly though. Kate is also another app that might be interesting to people looking for a powerful text/code editor.
Silent_Buddha said:
I avoid Linux like the plague as I don't have the time to dick around with it
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As long as you don't have too exotic hardware it works just fine. In fact the last time I installed W7 it was considerably harder for me to get stuff working than with Kubuntu. Though obviously I might just be exceptionally lucky :)
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Off topic a bit. But that's interesting. Is it basically an intiative to try to allow Linux applications to run in Windows? I avoid Linux like the plague as I don't have the time to dick around with it, but there are some Linux applications I wouldn't mind trying out if it didn't involve the hassle of installing/learning/troubleshooting Linux.
Click to expand...
These days, Linux rarely has much in the way of difficulties. Basically, as long as you stay away from brand-new distributions, Linux is likely to be roughly on par with Windows in terms of messing around with it.

That said, none of these issues with linux apply to the KDE for Windows initiative. Basically, it's a bit of a hassle to get set up, and then after that initial setup it's a nice little program for installing/uninstalling KDE apps on Windows.

One fun app that it has is a nice Sudoku game (KSudoku), as well as a nice solitaire game that supports a wide varieties of solitaire (KPatience). Granted, if you don't ever worry about those sorts of casual games, obviously it's no loss.
 
i got linux ppc years ago for a graphite iBook....haven't had to use it ever. And at that time ms was releasing cool games too...

Good to know that the auto-update seems fine for everyone else. I too haven't had to install it afresh for probably years.
 
Ubuntu 10.10 is one of the fastest, most hassle free OSs I've ever installed, and its insanely fast bootup speed means it is the quickest way to go from no power to beyond3d by a mile. :D

Anyway, just wanted to post that the Opera browser has been able to do torrents for a long time and still can. I don't torrent a lot, usually only for stuff like gamersyde, but when I do it's always through Opera.
 
Grall said:
I had no idea what this conduit thing is so I googled a bit to inform myself, and it would seem many people were silently infested with this scumware after letting utorrent autoupdate itself. There was no warning or choice involved, the stuff was just unloaded on their systems.

Even when a choice was given (in the form of checkboxes, which were unchecked to show the user did not want the toolbar) was that choice respected by utorrent. :( Those reports were from december of last year though, and maybe that was a legitimate bug which has been fixed since. I'm not acting guinea pig to find out though...


It would also seem, from my googling efforts, that the toolbar resists being uninstalled (as in, not actually uninstalling when running the uninstaller.) So the best thing would be to avoid utorrent entirely...

Too bad. It WAS a nice program, I was thinking of grabbing a BT client after not having had one installed for years and utorrent has been what I used last time. Not any more after this though. Sad when a company destroys itself and its reputation like this.
Click to expand...

Yes their trick this time was to seem like a utorrent license agreement. Dumb mistake by me not paying attention.

Also to confirm, for me, the uninstall program just removed the uninstaller part! :LOL:
Thanks for the suggestions. No program stays good for that long...
 
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