Portable BitTorrent Client (Transmission QT Windows)

Posted: Saturday 5 July 2014

As I was moving operating systems a while back, I needed a lightweight BitTorrent client on Windows that could be able to contact the protocol and download a single file - an operating system disc image.

Now this was once a part of an ongoing project that was to be published quite some time ago, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

The operating system in question is SteamOS, I wanted to install SteamOS on my computer. Well, it failed. The SteamOS distro that Valve themselves provide failed to work on my computer.

Luckily though, there is a version of Valve's SteamOS that is built with a custom partitioning feature, and other cool features.
However, it was only downloadable through BitTorrent. Imagine that! Here we have one of the many situations where Open source software is distributed through torrent networks!

Anyways, the bittorent clients that I found were all installers, and none really seemed to not shadow install some service that assisted with torrenting.

But, there's this nice open source software that doesn't shadow install anything: Transmission-Qt Win | Free Communications software downloads at SourceForge.net

Though the issue is, is that it still comes in an installer...
So to save you some time and space, here it is, Transmission QT in a universal .zip package (so that no prerequisites are needed to extract the portable folder):
Download 64Bit: Transmission_x64.zip (11.0 MB)
MD5: 0d336b521cace7063b6147360d6c03db
SHA256: 51c5576a5ac38632ca0c0c619c4a18cc4529ef47
VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/a8b945e5889bfd375618d55082b519d8a4a567978784426a1b77404d9b924bdb/analysis/1404553148/ (Clean Folder/File, but Google Chrome might return a false positive (contrary to the virustotal results), in any case, you can "Recover File" from the Downloads page in Google Chrome)
Download 32Bit: Transmission_x32.zip (11.1 MB)
MD5: b743ed3a0a835e3a04c2829b8d99f259
SHA256: 91415e9bd3966484d778cb50e957cbb9689f4b1f87723779027ebaa497b5c9a9
VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/91415e9bd3966484d778cb50e957cbb9689f4b1f87723779027ebaa497b5c9a9/analysis/1404553579/ (1 AV scanner returns a false positive, but of course, if you don't trust the file, don't download it, or use the 64Bit version)
If you dislike the closed-source nature of µTorrent, or dislike the tracking software that it installs on your computer, or dislike the fact that you have to go through an installation process, or even if you dislike µTorrent for installing junk onto your computer to make money (through EpicScale Riskware), then use Transmission if you're on Windows.

This portable version of Transmission guarantees that other junk/risky software does not got installed alongside the torrent client, as it only contains the executable of transmission, hence you can see that there is no other software that is bundled with it.

Transmission itself is an open source initiative, unlike uTorrent, so you know that the code within Transmission is safe, because you're able to read the source code yourself to check for any suspicious code.