Long-time torrent client users are likely annoyed by the bundles, offers, featured content, toolbars, banners and overall irritating adware brought by uTorrent, BitTorrent, and BitComet.

A solution is to move on to other, clean torrent clients. However, if you’ve grown fond of these three apps, keep reading to find out how to get rid of ads using their built-in settings and without having to resort to additional software.

Congratulations if you’ve got past the installation phase without installing third-party products. To eliminate the risk of unintentionally allowing the installation of additional components that aren’t required for the clients’ runtime, you can opt for the portable edition Portable uTorrent (made by another developer); BitTorrent and BitComet do not currently have portable counterparts). You could also try Unchecky, a tool that monitors software installations and blocks adware or warns you when you’re about to set up third-party components.

uTorrent and BitTorrent

uTorrent and BitTorrent have the same layout, so the next actions can be applied to both. Open the Options menu and go to Preferences or press Ctrl+P. Select Advanced from the list of settings on the left.

You can either look up the following options by clicking the empty Filter box to type their names or scroll the list until you spot them in the Name column:

• bt.enable_pulse,
• distributed_share.enable,
• gui.show_notorrents_node,
• gui.show_plus_upsell,
• offers.content_offer_autoexec,
• offers.featured_content_badge_enabled,
• offers.featured_content_notifications_enabled,
• offers.featured_content_rss_enabled,
• offers.left_rail_offer_enabled and
• offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled.

Take a look at the Value column for each of these options. If they are set to True, click the False option next to Value: under the table of options. Do this for each option, then click Ok to apply changes and return to the main window.

To further remove unused GUI elements, you can open the Options menu to deselect Show Toolbar (or press F4), Show Sidebar (or press F7), and Show Bundles (or press F8).

BitComet

In BitComet, some adware elements are represented by the Start Page, Comments and Snapshots tabs, as well as the Homepage, Movies, Music, Software, Games and Forums buttons on the toolbar.

The toolbar buttons can be hidden from the main window from the View -> Toolbar ->Buttons menu. Simply click the Homepage, Movies, Music, Software, Games , and Forums entries to disable this. However, you can open the menu and make the click for one item at a time. If you don’t use the toolbar at all, open the View menu to deselect Show Toolbar.

If you don’t use the search tool either, hide it from the View -> Toolbar menu by clicking Show Search Box to deselect it.

To get rid of the Start Page, Comments, and Snapshots tabs, open the Tools menu and go to Options or press Ctrl+P. In the Options panel, select Appearance from the list on the left, click the menu next to Default detailed info pane, and select a tab that you actually need, such as Statistics or Files. Just make sure it’s not set to Start Page, Comments or Snapshots. Click Ok to apply changes and return to the main window.

In the following step, right-click on any tab and click to deselect Start Page, Comments, and Snapshots. To get rid of the entire column on the left side of the main window (the one with All Downloads, Bookmarks, IE, Torrent Sites, Free Online Games, as well as login form on the bottom), open the View menu to deselect Show Favorites.

Play our video guide below to see the steps necessary to take for getting rid of adware in these torrent clients. You can also download uTorrent, BitTorrent, and BitComet.