I’ve mentioned before That I often have more than one operating system (OS) installed. I also use uTorrent for my bittorrent needs, and I don’t want to have to be running a specific OS in order to complete my downloads. Because of this, I’ve had to find a way to run the same copy of uTorrent — and have it load all of my torrents — in each OS.

I’ll break it down into a few easy steps.  Start in the OS that contains the working installation of uTorrent.

1. Put uTorrent.exe in a partition or folder accessible by both operating systems (OSs). For simplicity’s sake, it makes the most sense to have a data partition separate from your OS partitions for two reasons: 1) If you ever need to wipe out a system partition, you won’t have to worry about moving your data around, and 2) It will make the rest of the process simpler and sharing between your operating systems will be seamless.  I have my uTorrent folder on drive E:, for example.

2. Run uTorrent.exe. Now Windows will use this copy of the uTorrent executable instead of the one previously installed in your Program Files directory.

3. In your current OS, open Windows Explorer and navigate to %APPDATA%. This is a variable that will save you the hassle of typing the entire path (and remembering the different paths that it points to in different Windows version) into Explorer’s address bar.   There will be a uTorrent folder there.

4. Move the contents of this folder to the folder created in #1. Make sure to get all of the .torrent files for obvious reasons, and get all of the .DAT files, too; these will save uTorrent’s settings.

5. Now when you run uTorrent, it will see all of your .torrent files and continue leeching/seeding as it was before.  Boot in to your other OS and run the uTorrent.exe file and everything will be instantly be running properly there as well; as long as the path to the downloaded files are the same, so make sure the drive you download your torrent data to has the same letter in each Windows installation.

6. From now on, download all of your .torrent files to this new directory (E:\uTorrent in my example) and open them in uTorrent. They will be there when you boot into your other Windows installation. It’ll even work under Wine in Linux, though maybe not if you’re using a https tracker.

Have fun! As always feel free to comment with suggestions and/or corrections.

It seems that in the Linux and Mac communities, Windows is often being bashed for what it doesn’t do while being criticized for having too much bloat.  While I won’t get into the latter claim, I will address the first.  There are, unfortunately, numerous areas where Windows is lacking.  Out of the box, at least.  KDE’s Dolphin file manager allows Linux users to enjoy a tabbed browsing experience within the filesystem for example, and Windows Explorer is lacking that feature.  The old Alt-Tab application switcher does not measure up to OS X’s Exposé, and Flip-3D isn’t much better.  Windows for some reason doesn’t support multiple/virtual desktops (AKA “workspaces”).

Fortunately, there are some quality third-party applications to fill those gaps (and some others) in the Windows user interface.  Best of all, they’re free.  No trials, no ads for “Pro” versions.  Free.

Application Switcher: Switcher

Tired of having to keep holding that Alt key while you tap on Tab until you find your application?  Flip-3D is nicer, but it’s form over function, let’s be honest.  It’s nothing more than a glorified Alt-Tab.  Plenty of eye-candy, and one new functional feature:  the ability to select a window by clicking it.  Wow.

Switcher assigns a number to each open window and allows the user to view windows contents (something Flip-3D attempts), but instead of having to cycle through or use the mouse to select a window, all the user needs to do is type the number of the desired window, and Switcher will bring it to the front.  Of course, one can cycle through if they so desire, but the added functions and hotkeys make it unnecessary more often than not.