A little bit o' help with magnet links, please
 

Dearly Beloved,

As you know, some sharing-the-tunes sites out there on the Interwebs don't even bother with torrents anymore and use magnet links instead. I've tried to follow some tutorials about it but their descriptions are quite poor, and I have to confess I pretty much remain in the dark about this shit - all I know is that when I "get" the magnet link with my torrent client nothing happens, even with DHT, Local Peer Discovery and Peer Exchange enabled.

In case it's relevant (and I'm guessing it is), I'm still using μTorrent 1.8.5 (every so-called "upgrade" after that was wretched) on WindowsXP. AND, last but not least, I am NOT screwing any artist over; in fact, if I get this damn thing to work it'll be good for this whole message board.
:)

Many thanks in advance!

cant help with the magnets

but you should NOT be using xp. its discontinued and no longer updated by microsoft and thus its susceptibility to virus' is as high as some joke about a prostitute.

seriously you are overdue and update. get a new windows asap.

I know, I know... Actually, both my computers need to go also - they're just too slow for today's cyberworld.
:(

Still, I shall worship those who help me with the magnet links.

Not even just too slow, XP is possibly a combination of EVERYTHING that was every wrong or went wrong with the Windows platform, and by itself let Mac sneak back into the computing world. Go Windows 7 or 8, you will literally laugh at how bad XP really was in comparison..

You can get a new laptop for like $300.

I use utorrent 2.2.1 with Firefox (latest version, 30.0), and magnet links are working fine. Let Firefox open the magnet link in utorrent. It will initially be shown as a file of 0KB size. But when you start it, it will quickly change and show the proper size.
Perhaps the 1.8.5 version of utorrent didn't support it yet?

Thanks for the suggestions. I finally caved and installed Vuze, with which the magnet links worked A-OK. But the ESET antivirus did NOT care for several Vuze files, so once I got what I was after I uninstalled that client.

Now, to check the downloaded material and upload it for the board...

Metallica's Revenge

OH WAIT - it was as simple as: Preferences -> BitTorrent -> Basic BitTorrent Features -> Enable DHT Network. Done! I'm such a mook...