To the uninitiated Ares filesharing can be a minefield of techno babble, acronyms and, let’s face it, geek talk. It really doesn’t have to be like that. At its very basic Ares is as easy to use as a word processing application. You just search for a torrent that you want, load it into the Ares filesharing application, and click play. What could be simpler?!

It is the torrents that the life blood of Ares filesharing. These tell the software where on the Ares network to look for the parts of files that you need. Once your software has located one source it can start to download. As time goes on you may find more sources and, from there, you can begin to download from several sources at once.

The torrent itself is a simple text file with information the files that it relates to: names, how many parts it includes, where to find the original upload (the ’seed’), that sort of thing. If you want to go with geek talk then this is “Metadata”.

Once you have the file (in whole or any part of it) then you will be able to provide others with it. While you’re downloading episode the second part of 2 season 1 of friends, for example, someone else can be getting the first part (which you already have) from you!