TTDown Tutorial

OK... heard the excuses so often...please not a chinese site.. we are going to deal with the issue for once and for all.

The major requirement for using ttdown or any chinese site, is to simply ignore that they are in chinese. It is that simple really. You should know by know how your browser works and you should know by know that if you hover your mouse pointer over a link, you will usually see the url link in the status bar of your browser.. that is the lower border, the bottom of your browser in IE.

Part 1
For what we do on this board, the best entrance for ttdown is NOT
http://www.ttdown.com
or even
http://soft.ttdown.com

There is so much stuff on that site including all demo´s and chinese stuff that are irrelevant to us - unless you are chinese.. but then you don´t need this article anyway.

So for all cracked and regged and retail and keygenned applications (not games), the best link to use is
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_2_1.html

By using that link you have already filtered out all the demo´s and other irrelevant stuff.

As I said before, don´t get intimidated by all the chinese characters, because we do not need them, all english apps, have their name in english....
So if you see something like

[????] ???????(Symantec SystemWorks 2005) Final ????? [??]

the only relevant thing is (Symantec SystemWorks 2005) Final, as I said, simply ignore the rest. If, however you are curious, you can always copy it into altavista´s translator at

http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr
and select as translation Chinese-simp to English... the above will be translated as

[ System optimization ] Norton computer master (Symantec SystemWorks 2,005) Final official compact disc version [ five-star ]


Now just click the title/name which is the link of the app that interests you... for the above example that is
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftView/SoftView_27990.html


Let the page load, and again tell yourself to ignore all the chinese, you are only there to download an app and not to apply for a doctorate in Chinese literature. Since you want to download something, look for anything on the page saying DOWNLOAD ... duh :w00t: .. scroll down the page and you will see a big icon in a table box .. in the box you can see a green link behind a little yellow folder - remember that folder icon as it usually returns on all other chinese sites to indicate a download link..
The link is called

????????(Download Now!)
which is translated by altavista/BABELFISH AS
Clicks opens downloads the page (Download Now!)

Meaning... duh! #2... click it and it will open the download page... which in our example is
http://soft.ttdown.com/ViewDownurl.asp?softID=27990


On that page the title will be repeated and there will be the links to download, usually 4 of them, meaning there are 4 different servers @ ttdown... which one to use is always a bit of a gamble... Sometimes speed of those servers is so different that the best advice is to just right click them all to Download by FlashGET, see which one comes down the fastest after several minutes and just delete the other three.

PART 2

Go back to our initial page
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_2_1.html

Scroll down that page... scroll down till the very end of it.. there you will see as the last line in the WHITE body part of the page, so BEFORE the green bottom border.. a line with a lot of gibberisch
?? ???? ???? 300 ? | ?? ??? ??? ?? ??:1/3? 100???/?

translated by babelfish that means

Demonstrated high-quality goods software recently renewed 300 | home pages previous page next page of tails page page order: 1/3 page of 100 software/pages

I know that does not exactly make more sense anyway but at least you see that there are two important links namely PREVIOUS PAGE and NEXT PAGE.
If you have been just a little bit observant during part 1 you should have noticed that links on ttdown usually are green. Now hover your mouse over the green links in that part of the page and you will see where those links go to in the status bar of your browser.
From left to right they go to
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_2_2.html

which is the next page of the list we are using ...
and
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_2_3.html

which is the last page of the three that this list is composed of. Which is indicated by the 1/3... meaning page 1 of 3.. on the second page you will have two more links of course.. previous page and first page.

Again do not get intimidated by all the chinese, study the page for a couple of minutes and you will never ever forget how to use it anymore.

NOTE: depending on when you read this the list might be longer than just 3 pages, so if you see 1/8 for example the list has grown and new downloads have been added during the time between when I wrote this and the time you read this.. The principle remains the same of course.


PART 3

Go back to the product page of Norton Systemworks...
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftView/SoftView_27990.html


Let the page load, relax and sit back and study the page for a few minutes. That is important because all pages on ttdown look exactly like that one. So if you understand where everything is on this one single page you will know where it is on the whole site.

Just below the green border on the light green background you will see
????:??????? ? ???? ? ???? ? ???????(Symantec SystemWorks 2005) Final ????? [??]

which is the navigation menu if you want, translated by babelfish it means

Current position: Daily high-quality goods software garden -> system tool -> system optimization -> Norton computer master (Symantec SystemWorks 2,005) Final official compact disc version [ five-star ]

Those are all different links - note they are green and green is a link on ttdown.
The software description is in black, because that is where you are already, and it usually does not make any sense to put a link to the page you are on already. Just before ???????(Symantec SystemWorks 2005) Final ????? [??] you can see a little arrow... ? ... before that arrow, is a link that will take you to the catalog/category Systemworks belongs to.. in this case system optimization(see babelfish translation) ... before that link there is another arrow that will take you up one more level in the directory hierarchy they use on ttdown...system tool
So if you are looking for system tools and you want to see the whole offering on ttdown click the appropriate link in this navigation menu.. in this case...
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/Catalog_1_SoftTime_Desc_1.html


Now let´s look at the body of the page.. the part under the red title...there are some usefull things there..

The first three lines you can ignore...

The section ????: Win2003, WinXP, Win2000, WinNT, WinME, Win9X of course tells you what OS versions this app will run on... although they have been known not to get that right all of the time.

Just below that one you can see the number of stars they give that specific app.

The line below reads ????: 269.96 MB which of course means, the size of the download is 269.96 MB (could it mean anything else ?).

IMPORTANT : the link just below the size will usually take you to the homepage of the manufacturer of the app.. the software company that made it... note I say usually... not always. If you need info for your post on this forum.. that´s where you can get it from, if the link is there ...otherwise you will have to google for it.
As you can see in our example the link does NOT go to Symantec... probably for security reasons.

You can ignore the next three lines and the whole description/info in Chinese that follows... and you will get to your download link we described above.

That´s it.. that is how all pages on ttdown are structured.. as soon as you feel comfortable on this one.. you will be able to use all the other ones .. because they are basically all the same. Piece of cake... or Peking Duck biggrin.gif

NOTE : Sometimes they also give registration info and serials on the page @ ttdown, that usually is in red, just above the download link.


PART 4

Let´s go back to our main entrance page
http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_2_1.html


As you can see the list is still there. Now take a closer look to the list, note how all the apps are basically listed per line... our example
[????] ???????(Symantec SystemWorks 2005) Final ????? [??] 2004-9-27 269.96 MB

(I left out the stars... I have no idea what criteria they use to award those stars, but they`re not really relevant so forget about them.

The very first part on each line, namely the part between [ and ] is a different link than the longer link to the apps page. It links to the category the app is listed under on ttdown, so you can get to the category, without having to go to the product page first
Then next on the line after the app name are the date the download was added to the ttdown database and the size of the download.

Of course by using this as the entrance page there are some parts of the site that you do not get access to, like games and webdesign stuff and shareware/demo´s and other stuff. For that you better go to the front page
http://www.soft.ttdown.com
and copy some of the table headers there into babelfish to translate and you will know what is where if you need any of those.

Games are @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_6_1.html

Electronic books @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_5_1.html

Anti-Virus section is @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_4_1.html

Webdesign area (with lots of .asp and php source code) is @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/News_7_1.html

Video related plugins are @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/Catalog_81_SoftTime_Desc_1.html

Photoshop Plugins are @

http://soft.ttdown.com/SoftList/Catalog_111_SoftTime_Desc_1.html



PART 5

Tips & Tricks

1. To get rid of all the annoying banners and floating ads and stuff you can add *.ttdown.com to IE´s list of restricted sites, that should turn off javascript and ActiveX and it speeds up the loading of all pages considerably.
In IE.. choose menu > Tools > Internet Options.... click the Tab Security.. click the Red Icon for Restricted sites... click the button Sites... and type or copy and paste *.ttdown.com in the box... click OK and click OK to close Internet options.

2. There is one major drawback with what I described under 1 and that is that you can no longer search the site. You can however still search the site by using this link

http://soft.ttdown.com/Search_Soft.asp?selby=1&action=soft&keyword=KEYWORD

Just replace the word KEYWORD with your search term.
I suggest you bookmark the link

http://soft.ttdown.com/Search_Soft.asp?selby=1&action=soft&keyword=KEYWORD


3. Always use FlashGET when downloading from ttdown.

4 Before you copy your link into FlashGET, always look at it first... if the name of your download contains CHS, CHN or HH then you are likely about to download a Chinese app. Most stuff is English however, so I would not worry about that.. I think it happened to me twice in four years.

Once you get over your initial disliking of Chinese (or russian sites) and especially as soon as you get over your initial discomfort of being confronted with a foreign language as strange as Chinese is to us westerners, you will find out, that they have an incredible lot to offer. The catalog of ttdown is nothing short of stunning.. as you will find out as soon as you feel somewhat comfortable with it and start exploring it further.