Bit Comet
BitComet is a BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP client that helps you take the most out of the BitTorrent file sharing protocol, aiming to provide high download speeds with a reasonable impact on the system resources.
BitComet is one of the top players in this particular category, but one that still struggles to face competition and meet expectations. As any other BitTorrent client, its main purpose is to download files at very high speeds, which it achieves successfully. What sets it apart from similar clients is its stability, its support for HTTP/FTP, torrent exchange and anonymous downloads.
Installing BitComet can be a deal breaker if you lack patience, as it tries to feed you a bunch of third-party software, which the program does not require in order to work properly. Also, it attempts to change the homepage of the browsers installed on the system. However, all of these can be turned down, thus keeping your system settings unaltered.
BitComet’s interface doesn’t have an original design, so to say, as it resembles a great deal to other torrent clients. Users are continuously presented with advertising banners, not to mention the fact that the torrent channel panel on the left of the GUI is cluttered with all sorts of search suggestions.
Using it however is not rocket science if you are accustomed with BitTorrent clients. Feature highlights include multi-mirror and multi-section downloading, quick resume, bandwidth scheduler, a dedicated tool to shutdown computer after the download is completed, Intelligent Disk Cache and Intelligent Connection Optimization.
One of the most appreciated upsides of this client is that it allows you to prioritize the first and the last segments of media files, so you can preview them before the download is completed.
With Bitcomet, you can share your torrent files with other users via a searchable P2P network, a feature called Torrent Exchange. Bitcomet also has support for anonymous downloads through a paid VIP feature, thus preventing others from monitoring your file transfers.
Other features can be enabled or tweaked from the Options section. From here, you can configure settings related to proxy, download task, long-term seeding, integration with Internet Explorer and Firefox, integrated virus scan, download scheduler and remote downloading.
Leaving all these things aside, BitComet seems to work just like the rest of the crowd, although during our tests it proved a bit heavy on computer resources every time we downloaded files at high speeds. It however comes with speed limiters, so you can rest assured that computer performance won’t be affected too much when downloading files.
Overall, BitComet still seems to struggle to reach the elite of this software category. Even though it sports a number of unique features, a slightly friendlier approach would definitely give it a boost.