one other question. What is a bit torrent? I downloaded a debian bit torrent that i thought was the OS. now i don't know what it is.

Google lately?

http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

The best explanation is on:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduction.html

It is a system for distributed file sharing.

x86 BitTorrent
ISO 1 debian-30r2-i386-binary-1.iso.torrent cdb79ca3db1f39b1940ed58aa98da2e7
ISO 2 debian-30r2-i386-binary-2.iso.torrent 5ccbf54d7e5020a196353569fdbb0e5c
ISO 3 debian-30r2-i386-binary-3.iso.torrent b2c7358f676f7841c383538538f74cbc
ISO 4 debian-30r2-i386-binary-4.iso.torrent 121ce8204e71883281b7f0a8e6f547e1
ISO 5 debian-30r2-i386-binary-5.iso.torrent f6c27d0109e83ade5882ec21058a2d72
ISO 6 debian-30r2-i386-binary-6.iso.torrent 728012c7acbaa2fdfdcbfeb1bf43273d
ISO 7 debian-30r2-i386-binary-7.iso.torrent 2aa14e5f02f56a001c9ec38acce89b28
Anywhere
100% HTTP Debian Torrents ISO 1 ISO 2 ISO 3 ISO 4 ISO 5 ISO 6 ISO 7

this is what i downloaded from this site. so is it the debian os or bittorrent software. yes i know nothing about computers. i'm excited that i know how to format my hard drive and repartition.

bittorrent works by downloading partial files from multiple sources, and uploading from your machine bits of files you already downloaded. if they're roughly 650-700MB large than they are the iso's, if not they are just the first part that would normally launch the bittorrent client.

so to install debian on my pc i need to download the iso?

Yes, the small files only contain the information about where to download the ISOs from.

Choose a bittorrent client, and open the files/torrents you downloaded. The rest should take care of itself.

hey thanks for the info. that was a real help.