Bittorrent programs

I was about to download the Helix.ISO and I noticed it was available as a torrent.

Now I don't know much about torrents except that they are similar to P2P networks (same but different).

Is it going to be faster/more reliable to download via a torrent rather than through Firefoxes download manager?

Are Bittorrent clients full of spyware much like P2P clients?

Can you recommend a client program subject to the above?

Pardon my ignorance but I've not dabbled with filesharing progs since the original Napster days and my only other experience with them has been removing the spyware that comes with E-donkey/grokster etc.

Torrent is nothing like firefox downlod manager, if you're downloding helix.iso from their FTP or website, i wold recommend that, torrent files can go fast, they can go slow, depends how many people have them for download available, they work like this, while you download, the part that you already downloaded is being uploaded to another user at the same time, so if not people people are downloading it, it's going to be slow. I recommend to download from their site/ftp ! :)

Aspman, for your safe, d/l bt from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/bittorrent/
its malware free.
About performance issues, read copyright reply.

Spot on Copyright I tried to use a torrent last night and it was v slow. FTP was better.

Any suggestions for a malware free download manager. The Firefox manager got the iso down to 91% and then dropped it and wouldn't resume the download.

Two things:

Debian.com recommends FreshDownload as a download manager. That should work nicely for you as it supports the resuming of broken downloads.

As a Bittorrent client, I highly recommend you download Azureus as opposed to the official client. Azureus supports has loads of nice features and even supports resume in case you're interrupted. (Which I don't think the official client has. At least when I used it, it didn't.)

- Xierox

resuming is as easy as restarting the torrent and pointing it to the same folder/file you started the first time. It checks existing data and resumes fine.

I don't like azureus. To many problems with java engines and things like that. Not to mention that a lot of trackers block the newer verrsions of azureus because it has upload stat cheating built-in. I like ABC or BitTornado.

Hello!
I agree with the reply above. The java is using so much RAM that this torrent client is not good for old computers(I thing so).
I used a lot of torrent clients(hey I live in Bulgaria - few months ago we had so much free FTPs(for music, movies. But now the police closed them and we are all using torrent network. I didn't find any spyware in the programs I tested.
The program I love is bitspirit. Very easy to use(aa, Azerues has many function but it si difficult to understand how to use the).
I like also Bitcommet, but it uses more RAM.
One example: with the same files seeding and downloadin bitspirit uses 20 to 40MB RAM. And bitcommet uses always more then 50MB. One time it used 87MB RAM.

I like Azureus. That said, as for security, I believe you get the md5 hash when you download a '*.torrent' file and I think that the program (Azureus, BitTornado, etc...) hashes and compares, not 100% sure on that, but that is what I have been lead to believe. Good Luck :D

/* Edit: Misspellings */

How do i download torrents from an FTP!!!Newbie here, take it easy on me