Donkey Needs A Kick In The Ass (eDonkey2000)

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	eDonkey2000
Date:	24/10/02 (205 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Apparently good for downloading larger files, Apparently has a large userbase, Is decentralised so not likely to follow the Napster route of being dragged through the courts(yet)

Disadvantages: Connecting to a server is a major pain in the butt, Server lits need to be regularly updated

It's interesting to see this software sitting here with two five star ratings because my experience and the experience of plenty of others I've seen posting on various message boards(which I looked at when trying to figure the flippin' thing out) seems to be a distinctly negative one. It?s one of the many, many filesharing clients out there and considering the competition it would have to be something special indeed to warrant anyone using it in preference to the rest. Effectively, however it?s the worst I've come across.

I'd love to talk of my personal experience of its features, download times, availabilty of files etc. but I can'?t. Why? Simply because after many hours of tinkering around, hunting through message boards, changing configurations and downloading different server lists in case the ones I was using were out of date I simply could not get it to connect to a server to even BEGIN searching for and downloading files. Maybe it's because I have a crappy AOL connection, not enough memory or some other problem (I can and do use several other similar programs without any kind of trouble though) but it just will not connect and as I said, it seems I?m not alone. Many of the message boards I read consisted of the same question repeated over and again..."?I can?t connect to a server - any tips?" and variations of it. Some articles from websites devoted to file-sharing and suchlike also mention the same problem, one or two giving reviews like this one - i.e. "we heard it was great but erm, we couldn?t use it" - and that comes from supposed 'experts' in filesharing...if there is such a thing.

Those who can get it to work claim it's an extremely versatile piece of software and you can get really fast download times from it...if you spend a fair amount of time tinkering around with various advanced options to get it to do so. Others claim it's incredibly slow, leaves you waiting in do
wnload queues and disconnects frequently - assumedly, they're some of the non-techie users who haven?t spend 20 hours tinkering with it to get it to work properly then? Anyway, after many hours of tinkering I couldn't use it but I can tell you it's a decentralised network which supports multi-source downloading and apparently has quite a large user-base (I don?t see how if so many can?t even connect to it) and apparently can give you lightning fast downloads if you can ever get it to connect. The interface looks rather cluttered and it's certainly NOT a download client for a newbie and does require you to regularly update your server listings or you?ll be stuck with out of date information. It's the only download client I know which actually requires regular maintenance in this way. It's always worth trying I suppose if you're having difficulty finding the file you want elsewhere although if you can?t find it using something like KaZaA which is one of the largest networks(using kazaalite, not the spyware packed kazaa client of course) then you're probably not going to find it at all. My experience says it's not worth a download and it seems it's an awful lot of hassle even if you can get it to connect to a server. Why bother when there are so many out there which work straight away without you having to mess around with complicated configurations?

There is also the usual issue of spyware which the eDonkey2000 installer comes bundled with where something like WinMX, Kazaalite or XoloX does not and when you consider the number of people who seem to have a problem with this software I can?t see the availability of files being all that great, despite assurances elsewhere. Given the problems, I'd say go for WinMX (winmx.com) for good, spyware-free downloading or one of the others if you don?t care about spyware but avoid this one unless you like to play around with problematic software.

Summary: