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 started with a slew of religious folk re-tweeting the phrase “Know God… know peace. No God, no peace.” “No God” then became the #1 trending topic, overloading the site.

Twitter’s explanation didn’t seem to get through to many offended Christians who were left wondering how “No God” became such a hot topic.

UPDATE @ 4:15 PST: I wonder if the frequent site overloads are what led Twitter to remove “No God” from the trending topics list?

UPDATE @ 4:50 PST: I think Twitter answered it for me:

It appears that Twitter is practicing a little selective censorship. Not good.

After reading an article about how Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine is gaining in popularity since its launch, I decided to finally try it out.

I decided to use the exact same search string in both engines so that I’d get an idea as to which one would give me better results.

Being a smartass, the string I chose was “why is windows so expensive.”

Search Results:

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Google search: results appear unfiltered.

Bing search: playing dumb?

Hmm. Microsoft apparently tried to help correct my grammar by replacing “is” with “are,” and suggested I wanted to know why vinyl windows were expensive. Maybe Bing’s just dumb?

Nope. Bing had the audacity to replace “windows” with “Mac” and “OSS” in the search string. Mac and Open Source, of course, being the two main threats to Windows’ domination of the PC market. That seems pretty dishonest, doesn’t it?

Now, I realized that this wasn’t 100% scientific. There was no incriminating question for Google to choke on and avoid. Maybe all search engines did this. So, I tried another search string to even things up a bit: “google privacy concerns.”

Search results:

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Google search: again, results appear unfiltered.

Bing search: some different results, but to be expected with a different search algorithm

Conclusion:

Google doesn’t seem to filter out negative press for the company in its search results. Microsoft does, shamelessly. I think I’ll be sticking with Google.