After reading an article pointed to by user
humpty (
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=353#comment23843), and some research in the Internet at large and in the official Comet Forums (
http://www.cometforums.com/forum/3-bitcomet/), I must confess that I'm now rather favorably impressed with
BitComet.
Let me start by saying that I haven't thoroughly checked its portability or its torrent performance yet, and at around 40 MB uncompressed it can hardly be placed alongside more lightweight bittorrent clients such as
Halite, for example (
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1380).
What I liked, though, is that it proved to be a very competent all-in-one download manager, featuring portability, browser integration and 32 and 64 bit native executables (there seems to be a definite shortage of native 64 bit download managers, if you ask me) in one package (I still have to research it better, there's a lot of info -- and bad press, for that matter -- on the torrent aspects, but not so much on the others...).
Better yet, after I changed the default port it was able to do some NAT traversal on its own without further configuration, achieving torrent download greenlights even while my computer was behind the transparent firewall of the local university, something no other client had managed to date.
So here's an updated screenie, displaying how it looks in Windows 7 x64 (that's its dropbasket there in the lower right corner).
- <image deleted from server>
BitComet is currently at v1.36 and it is almost natively portable; both 32 and 64 versions are included in the zip file available from
http://www.bitcomet.com/doc/download-achive.php.
It still sets some window related registry entries, as detailed in the database entry and it tries to integrate itself with MS
Internet Exploder(
), but that is hardly surprising given the scope of its use. Other browser plugins and extensions can be found in the 'Tools' folder. There's also an eDonkey network plugin available for download.
@
webfork: as this is the official BitComet forum topic, please edit the subject of the first post accordingly to avoid confusion. Thanks.