If you want to connect to a FTP in Windows 7 or Windows 8 to download files e.g. the latest game client for Lineage 2, you don’t need much.
What Is FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is used to transfer files over the internet. You surely visited a website with a large table of folders – yep, that was a FTP site opened in your browser.
The most commonly used FTP software for Windows 7 and 8 is the software Filezilla and SmartFTP – both are reliable tools to connect to FTP servers.
Connecting to a FTP server for the first time
1. Step Download and install SmartFTP from http://www.smartftp.com/download/
2. Step You might be asked to close programs during the installation e.g. AMD FUEL Service and Catalyst Control Center – proceed
3. Step One of the most popular public ftp servers is ftp://ftp.isi.edu/ – an FTP server of the University of Southern California. The FTP server is used for downloading Internet RFC’s and other software. I suggest that you start connecting to these FTP servers to get a feeling of what FTP software can be used for.
4. Step Simply copy the URL to your clipboard and SmartFTP will recognize it as a FTP URL – handy, eh?
5. Step You can then press the connect button and you just connected
In the left pane you can now now browse the folders and files on the FTP server of the university (of course not all files are public)
6. Step If you want to transfer files to your computer you can now set up a location in the right pane, click on Open a local browser
7. Step Once that is done, you can drag files from the left pane (the actual FTP server) to your local browser and it will copy the files to your own PC.
Connecting to private FTP with username and password
If you want to connect to private FTP servers you often need a password and it’s also possible they are not listening on port 21 (the default port for FTP connections)
Simply enter the information you get from a website.
Press CTRL + N
Host typically starts with ftp e.g. ftp.isi.edu – username and password should be obvious. Login Type can be Anonymous if you know there is no password.
As you can see downloading files from a FTP server couldn’t be easier. I still remember the first time I used an FTP tool in the late 90’s – exciting times were ahead of me, I had no clue of. Discovering this part of the web is exciting.
Yes, there are places you have to be careful of and certainly don’t download files from any random FTP server. You can often find files like beta clients and other stuff on public press FTP servers by companies like NCSoft – that is quite exciting because you’ll never know what you find on it. Maybe some employee accidentally uploaded a hint about the next blockbuster game – happened before, will happen again.
Have fun! I hope this helped some of you who are new to FTP stuff and Windows 7.