I had mentioned Xunlei Thunder in one of my earlier posts (Six Ways to Bypass Torrent Connection Blocking and Throttling).I had stated that, “Xunlei is faster than most other popular torrent clients like uTorrent and BitComet”. Well, I was wrong. No, Xunlei is fast. In fact, it is faster that pretty much everything else. However, I was wrong in assuming that Xunlei is less popular than some of the more familiar names like uTorrent and BitComet. As it turns out, Xunlei Thunder is the most popular torrent client in the world.
uTorrent’s market share may have doubled in a year, but according to TorrentFreak, Thunder blasted uTorrent’s market share away in the latest survery. So, how come most people have never heard about Xunlei Thunder? This is because Xunlei is available only in Chinese.
Thunder is a capable download manager which supports HTTP, FTP, MMS, RTSP, eMule and BitTorrent. All the basic features you expect from a download manager are present in Thunder. However, it lacks the multimedia downloading abilities of Orbit or the power of Internet Download Manager (IDM).
The default installer of Xunlei Thunder is riddled with all sorts of crapware in addition to being an adware. However, a modified English version provided by HeHeHunter doesn’t include any malware or advertisements. In fact you don’t even need to install it since the modded version of Xunlei is available as a portable utility.
Download Xunlei Thunder English (Portable Green Edition with No Ads) (10.42 MB)
License: Free
Version Reviewed: 5.8.13.699
Operating System: Windows all
I had read about it on Torrent freak but couldn’t find a english edition. Need to test it before can coment about it as for most of us utorrent is still the lightest and fastest torrent client.
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uTorrent is definitely lighter, however Thunder is faster on my college WiFi where port forwarding is blocked.
Rumor of freeware spreads fast.
I will wait until it been tested it.
I have been using it for close to a year. Never had any problems with Thunder.
Pallab´s last blog ..Xunlei Thunder – Fast and Efficient Download Manager With BitTorrent Support
What is the latest version?
Xunlei / Thunder MOD Version 1.0.0 (written February 26th, 2009):
http://v1.hehehunter.com/xunlei/xunlei-thunder-mod-version-100/
seen in the picture above
Xunlei 5.9.1.922 – Translation Problems (written June 2nd, 2009):
“Xunlei Thunder finally encrypt their sources. Disallowing me from editing the core files.
Most probably I won’t be able to translate Xunlei Thunder anymore. So, it’s wise that ThunderMOD user not to update to the latest thunder if you or your computer cannot read chinese.
This is no good…”
http://v1.hehehunter.com/xunlei/xunlei-591922-translation-problems/
…or from the same post comment:
…”version 5.9.10.1144 looks nice.”
The latest version is 5.9.14.1246 . English version of 5.9 is available here. I didn’t mention it as I haven’t tried it yet.
Give it a try if you want to, but make sure you have a strong registryguard/av which will alert you if thunder makes any changes to the system. I am not sure if all the crap that thunder installs has been pruned from this version.