Today I tried Vuze for the first time, being so far a user of uTorrent. UTorrent is a very convenient program, yet it has a real and strange problem, at least in the configuration of my system (Windows 7, Quad Core Asus/AMD). The problem is that uTorrent adds 25% more heat to my PC. I don’t know why this happens, but after using Vuze for exactly the same uploads/downloads, this 25% of additional heat disappeared, proving Vuze a really ‘cool’ program.

Vuze unfortunatelly is written in Java, which makes it platform independent but unable to take full advantage of the Windows engine.  The active windows are shown in the sidebar. The active torrents are displayed through My Library (and its subsets Downloading and Unwatched). Vuze HD Network offers a browseable limited directory of available torrents, and you can also search the open internet for new torrents. There are also separate pages for e.g. Subscriptions, Devices and for each active plugin.

The upper panel shows the downloading torrents, and the bottom panel the completed seeding torrents. New users are initially shown the “Simple view”, which shows only a limited amount of information per torrent. You can change that to “Advanced view”, which enables you to see more information. Contents of the most table views can be modified through Column setup dialog.

Vuze is a solid client, able even to import unfinished downloads left over by previously used clients (something utorrent can not do). Vuze is also great when it comes to torrent search. I will come back to this review after I have been a while with Vuze, but so far everything seems nice.

• Screenshots and Downloads of Vuze (Azureus)

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• µTorrent (utorrent) bitTorrent client – convenient, but with problems

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