uTorrent is teh suck
March 2, 2011 10:24 AM   Subscribe

What is the best torrent client that isn't utorrent?

utorrent has started causing BSOD errors. I've spent the last 2 days trying to figure out a fix but at this point I'd rather just use something else.

So is Vuze still the 2nd best choice or is there something else the hivemind recommends.
posted by Bonzai to Computers & Internet (18 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
FYI, when that started happening to me on an older machine it was because the hard drive that uTorrent was accessing had started to go bad. If you've got multiple drives in that machine you might want to try disabling the possibly suspect one and see if that makes your problem go away.
posted by Oktober at 10:26 AM on March 2, 2011


Best answer: I use Vuze and I like it a lot.
posted by torisaur at 10:42 AM on March 2, 2011


Best answer: deluge
posted by FunGus at 10:45 AM on March 2, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I agree with the sentiment that it's unlikely that uTorrent alone is causing BSODs... Perhaps, as Oktober suggests, you have a drive nearing failure or some sort of screwy driver... what version of Windows are you on? How old's the computer?
posted by disillusioned at 10:50 AM on March 2, 2011


Response by poster: utorrent is most certainly not causing your blue-screens.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment that it's unlikely that uTorrent alone is causing BSODs... Perhaps, as Oktober suggests, you have a drive nearing failure or some sort of screwy driver... what version of Windows are you on? How old's the computer?

It only happens when I'm using utorrent, the error is a page fault in a nonpaged area.

I don't care if utorrent is at fault or the root cause of the problem, if a different client stops the problem that is good enough for me. If I still get BSODs using something else then I will do the hard work of chasing down the actual root cause.
posted by Bonzai at 11:09 AM on March 2, 2011



I don't care if utorrent is at fault or the root cause of the problem, if a different client stops the problem that is good enough for me. If I still get BSODs using something else then I will do the hard work of chasing down the actual root cause.


But it is a symptom of deeper problems, and you might want to track down the source before your OS or harddrive collapses. At the very least, start backing up your drive regularly if you don't already. It could be that all the disc activity is exacerbating a problem.

But okay, in good faith to the original question, I find that Deluge is quite good as well. I run it under linux myself, but it seems to have a reasonable feature set, good useability, and a small enough memory footprint to keep me happy.
posted by Stagger Lee at 11:13 AM on March 2, 2011 [3 favorites]


I had this exact same problem with two different torrent programs, and it was, indeed, a bad hard drive that died painfully within a couple months. (Win XP) So, in my experience, if it *is* the hard drive, a different torrent program won't help.
posted by wending my way at 11:15 AM on March 2, 2011 [2 favorites]


Best answer: I liked Bitcomet when i used a windows machine.

http://www.bitcomet.com/
posted by MansRiot at 11:22 AM on March 2, 2011


Response by poster: To all: I am aware this might be a symptom of a larger problem, think of changing clients as my way of eliminating utorrent as a cause.
posted by Bonzai at 11:27 AM on March 2, 2011


Back in the day I wrote this little piece of stuff called "The BT Bible". It's still largely valid today if you can find it floating around the interwebs.

I just wanted to tell you that Vuze is great, but it's azureus (I also wrote what was the only really valid azureus tweaking guide for a long time, check the username) and it will, at somepoint, find itself subject to java memory bloat and kill itself.

Bitcomet has historically been known as a dirty client---it doesn't really do a good job doing what it's supposed to do in terms of validly sharing and reporting what it's doing. This may have changed...but it was really only slightly better than BitLord...which was utter garbage.

This really is a problem indicative of a larger issue---the people here aren't just being dicks and skimming the meat of your question. I would suggest turning down your maximum number of connections (to, say, 50 at the most) and see if that addresses the issue. Almost certainly you've got a failing hard drive and/or RAM.

HDDRegen will almost certainly realign the platters if it's just bad sectors.
posted by TomMelee at 12:06 PM on March 2, 2011 [2 favorites]


Might I suggest finding the most reliable version of uTorrent (1.6.1), instead of the more recent crap (IMO).
posted by kuanes at 12:37 PM on March 2, 2011


Response by poster: TomMelee:

Thanks. I suppose I could have been a little vaguer with my question (i.e. help me track down this problem) instead of just how do I fix step 1. But I try to keep AskMe questions very specific.

If Deluge (which is what I picked, thanks everyone) has the same problem (and I suspect it will) then my next step will be checking the hard drive. After that I'll check memory. After that I'll check my network card drivers.

While I was typing this I crashed again, this time with Deluge. I'll try the same thing on a different drive now and see if that fixes the problem. Thanks for the tip about HDDRegen.
posted by Bonzai at 12:39 PM on March 2, 2011


page fault in a nonpaged area

Your hard disk has a bad block and Windows is too stupid to remap it automatically.

The least slow way to deal with this is to open My Computer, right-click on drive C: and select Properties, then click the Tools tab, check the disk for errors, and turn on the checkbox that mentions scanning the disk surface for bad blocks. Windows will want to reschedule the check at next startup. Let it do that, then restart and let the disk check run to completion. It will take a few hours.
posted by flabdablet at 3:39 PM on March 2, 2011


Response by poster: Once I determined it was the disk (actually disk X:\) I ran chkdsk and it found some bad indexes. I will now do this surface scan. Thanks so much.
posted by Bonzai at 4:07 PM on March 2, 2011


Because I can't leave well enough alone: let HDDRegen fix those errors...not windows. For seriousness.
posted by TomMelee at 5:48 PM on March 2, 2011


I'm guessing you don't need this anymore, but if you do, here's one of Wikipedia's wondertabulous Compairson pages, this one for BitTorrent clients.
posted by Senza Volto at 7:31 PM on March 2, 2011


meh - if you fix it with HDDRegen (or Spinrite or ddrescue or any other tool that rewrites bad sectors in place to force the HD's own inbuilt remapper to hide them) you end up with no loss of disk capacity and a negligible slowdown on access to the sectors so remapped. If you let a Windows surface scan find them, Windows will simply avoid using them and you end up with no loss of disk speed and a negligible loss of space. It really doesn't matter.
posted by flabdablet at 12:04 AM on March 3, 2011


The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to µtorrent. Additionally, qBittorrent runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD).
posted by CautionToTheWind at 9:19 AM on March 4, 2011


« Older Where does google have the 45 degree map view?   |   This is going to be tough. Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.