How to schedule downloads in a torrent program?

If you use torrent programs such as uTorrent or BitTorrent to download often and besides, if you use  limited data plans or if you use special data plans such as night plans - then scheduling torrent programs would help you a lot to manage your downloads. 

Suppose you have a special data plan: free night unlimited downloads from 10 PM to 6 AM and outside this downloads are chargeable, then scheduling download would be helpful. We can let the torrent program handle the downloads.

Enable scheduler on uTorrent program:

• Open uTorrent > Options > Preferences
• Find Scheduler in the left hand side panel
• Check “Enable Scheduler”

Now here we will see the days of the week and each day marked with 24 squares of 1 hour each starting from 00:00 hours to 24:00 hours.

• Assuming our special data plan time is from 10:00PM to 6:00 AM, let’s setup uTorrent from 23 hours to 6 hours to start from 11 PM to 6 AM.
• Click on each square twice till it is “WHITE” to turn off download for that hour. (You can also click and drag to change the color on multiple cells).
• For each hour that you want the download to be on, keep it GREEN
• There are also “LIMITED DOWNLOAD” and “SEEDING ONLY” if you prefer.
• If you want to limit UPLOAD, set it to “1” kB/s. Blank means unlimited.

So the scheduler should now look something like the screenshot below:

That’s it? No.

Preventing the torrent program not to go to sleep when downloading:

If there is no option in the program to prevent the computer to sleep, we need to setup power options on our computer so that the computer does not go to sleep during the download period. In utorrent, there is an option available to prevent the computer to go to sleep when downloads are active. 

To prevent the computer from going to sleep:

• Click on Options > Preferences > General
• At the bottom of the window, check the box that says "Prevent standby if there are active torrents"

Setting up power options on Windows laptop:

• On the system tray, right-click on the battery or power icon and select “power options’
• Select “Change plan settings”
• Set “Put the computer to sleep” to NEVER for “PLUGGEN IN” :  that means as long as your laptop is getting power from AC, it should not go to sleep. *Don’t do this for BATTERY

That’s it. Cheers!

*Do you like this post? I would be glad to know –leave me your comment, share it if you like.