BitTyrant – Hacking the Ratios

BitTyrant is one of the best Torrent downloaders around, but sometimes I get the feeling that my download speeds are bad because my upload to download ratio is bad. My guess is that the clients of the seeds and peers that I am downloading from reduce the bandwidth that I get when they see that my ratios are bad.

There are two ratios – one is the global upload to download ratio and the other is the upload to download ratio associated with a particular torrent.

My theory is that the download speed that one gets can be improved by improving the ratios. The higher the ratio the better – it means you upload more than you download. This is a luxury only people with unlimited, fast internet connections can have.
The other option is to somehow fool the seeds and peers into thinking you have a good ratio. This can be done by hacking the BitTyrant statistics and config files.

Here are instructions for doing this in Windows XP.
First modify the global statistics (global ratio):

1. First make sure BitTyrant is completely closed. To do this, right-click its icon in the System Tray and click Exit.
2. Go to Start > Run  and paste this %appdata%/BitTyrant and press enter
3. Right click the file azureus.statistics click Open.
4. Click “Select the program from the list” and click OK.
5. Select Notepad from the list then click OK.
6. In Notepad. Look for the word “uploaded”. It is followed by a long number and ends with something like “e6″.
7. Add any two random numbers just befor “e6″.
8. Save the file and close it.
9. Restart BitTyrant.
10. You should now have a good global ratio (indicated by the green button in the status bar), if not, go through the entire process again – from step 1.

Next modify each torrent’s ratio:

1. First make sure BitTyrant is completely closed. To do this, right-click its icon in the System Tray and click Exit.
2. Go to Start > Run  and paste this %appdata%/BitTyrant and press enter
3. Right click the file downloads.config and click Open.
4. Click “Select the program from the list” and click OK.
5. Select Notepad from the list then click OK.
6. In Notepad. Look for the word “uploaded”. It is followed by a long number and ends with something like “e6″.
7. Add any two random numbers just befor “e6″.
8. Save the file and close it.
9. Restart BitTyrant.
10. You should now have a good ratio (double click the ratio button in the status bar to check), if not, go through the entire process again – from step 1.

This procedure may result in dramatic improvements in your download speeds.

CloneCD

This is a useful tool to make exact copies of CDs or DVDs that have copy protection. You can also load the copied CD images as virtual drives.
The software is not freeware, it costs $39 but a trial version runs for 21 days with all features enabled.

The wikipedia article on CloneCD says that the setup programs of some software scan the computer for CloneCD and other copy-defeating programs. If one of these programs are discovered the setup program either fails or installs with major glitches showing up later.

Clone Cd images consist of more than one type of file. There are four filetypes: .ccd , .cue , .img and .sub
I’m not sure what each of these files contain, but the .img file is the largest and may be the “main” image file.