PC for downloading only?

[Harsky]

I've got a PC tower that's been sitting in the garage for a few months now and I was wondering how many people actually have a dedicated PC tower where it's only used for downloading from bittorrent? If that's the case, apart from putting in a bigger HDD, is there anything that needs upgrading to make it run for a long, long time?

 

[xalphax]

i do, but not only for me. my brothers and i set this up for the whole family.

we just figured its better to do the downloading on one pc, which is on 24/7 rather than 3 or 4 pc's running the whole time.

 

[superrob]

A good PSU is requierd so it doesn't burn down

good cooling and a large HDD then you got it.

 

[VVoltz]

This is a great idea, I broke my Laptop for dedicating it to download crap from the Infernet.

 

[Harsky]

Another question. How do I make it so that when in the event of the PC turning itself off by accident and I don't have a spare monitor, I can just push the power button and when windows powers up, it also loads up the bittorrent program as well?

 

[rhyguy]

well, i think there might be away to auto load up a user account on startup, then put utorrent's short cut (or what ever bitorrent thing you use) in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

(you might need to change the drive letter to the drive in which xp is installed on)

 

[slayerspud]

Nice PSU, and a big HDD.

Currently using my 600MHZ Pentium 3 to download with, connected to 2 500GB external Hdd's.

 

[Banger]

I know a lot of people that do but I just use my main PC which is rather cluttered with junk right now that I have to burn off.

 

[iritegood]

A good network card. A good cooling system if you want to leave it on for a long time. A connection to your network if you want to send the files back to your main comp. And an ISP that has good up-speed. And leave all the torrents there until you reach atleast a 1:1 ratio.

 

[living-ghost]

Look into raid and logical volume management.

If your computer doesn't already have one get a raid controller.

 

[DjoeN]

and place the PC in a room with more or less a constant temperature!

I have a dedicated pc, not for torrent's or downloading, more like 24/7 on so i can access it from work anytime
it has a dual psu and semi watercooled cpu, coolingplates on the memory and i replaced the standard gpu coolingfan with a copper coolingthing with fan integrated, all CD/DVD/HDD's get powered by 1 psu with dual fans of 350Watt, All the rest (pc itself) gets powered by a 500watt psu with dual fans (AMD XP Duron 2500+)

All this hangs on a emergency powerthing, in case of a powerdownfall (wich happens regulary cause my father in law likes to mess with the electricity and powers it off on a regular base to mess around)

Bios is set to power back on after a power loss.

Case is an Antec maxi tower (chieftec)
1 dvd reader 2 dvd writers and 8 HDD's 2 pci ide raid controllers and 1 sata/ide raid controller (with 3 sata connections and 1 ide)
2 front coolers thazt blow over the hdd's to keep them cool and 2 back coolers to suck out the heat inside the case
(All silent coolers (but it still makes alot of noise anyway))

That's kinda my little home server that does all, all running on a legit windows xp pro (i know i should upgrade to windows home server, but i'm to lazy to reconfigure all after an install, most configuration was done at work by my partner who's a damned fine network specialist

)

 

[pduin]

to be honest, any old pc will do.
i am using a 400mhz (passively cooled!) celeron with 256mb running win XP and torrent down/uploads 24/7 and it works perfectly. it doesn't have a monitor: i control it by remote desktop

my advice: dont use a pc which draws much power! letting a beefy pc run 24/7 can be a big hit on your power bills!

 

[Harsky]

So I have one of those USB wireless adapter that can can connect to a wireless router and go online. It's decent enough but I'm stuck on what to do to make it communicate with my main PC so I can transfer the files I downloaded on to shitty PC to my main PC

 

[Seicomart]

I thought anyone with any sense did this?

Anyhow, as others have said, a good psu is key, something from Enermax or Corsair costing about £100 should see you right.

Make sure you either use a case with great airflow, or you can retrofit the case you have with 120mm fans, sort the cabling out to stop pockets of hot air forming and strip out any unnecessary components.

Something many people over looks is to remove the graphics card, especially ones with their own fans, and just use the on-board chipset as this reduces power being taken up, avoids a system crash due to the graphics card being stressed and of course reduces the system heat a fair bit too.

You can probably forget about transferring the files via wireless's - the uneven speed, plus the high chance of the hd in your leeching deck being fragmented = a recipe for cyclic redundancy errors abound. So unless you want to stream movies, best to defrag and simply burn the files.

If you have some spare money you could also pay an electrician to make a "clean" power source for the pc, or a cheap option would be to get a decent uninterupted power supply to reduce your deck resetting in the event of power spikes, storm interference or other electrical issues.

Get a decent hd if you can, Seagate are great and give you a 5 year warranty, some firms such as Western Digital only give 3 years and will send you a second hand "reconditioned" drive as a replacement. I've never had a Seagate drive fail, unlike pretty much drives from all the other major manufacturers. Having a 16meg buffer and 7200 rpm helps..

EDIT: Oh and I use Emule, much better than the leeching hell that is bittorrent

 

[test84]

well, i think there might be away to auto load up a user account on startup, then put utorrent's short cut (or what ever bitorrent thing you use) in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

(you might need to change the drive letter to the drive in which xp is installed on)

'
u can use "Powertoys for windows xp" for that matter.

 

[greyhound]

i did this a while ago, set utorrent as a startup program used TED to automate TV episode downloads using RSS and just checked up on it every once in a while using VNC

you can check start up programs using these keys

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
(all new user accounts)

reset passwords for default account by running:

control userpasswords2

and unchecking the box

 

[arctic_flame]

My dedicated download machine would have either tinyXP or Xubuntu on it... probably Xubuntu

If no processes are using up lots of CPU time, it doesn't get hot.

 

[Harsky]

Hmm. Small problem. I chose Utorrent as the bittorrent client since I never had a problem with them and did a trial test where I loaded it up with torrents. Turned it off and back on again to simulate me pushing the button for the first time without a monitor connected to it. Suddenly I get this message

Which was lucky since if I tried it tomorrow, I'd have left this PC run for hours without anything being downloaded at all. Apart from getting another torrent client, is there any other solution?

 

[greyhound]

i've never seen that message before, but I don't use torrents now.

Try getting an older version of utorrent @oldversion

 

[arctic_flame]

Can you allow uTorrent to be run on startup in the options?