No such thing as a free lunch. (KaZaA)

Member Name: sit2020

Product:	KaZaA
Date:	18/05/04 (647 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free music, video, software etc

Disadvantages: Other programs that say hello to your PC.

I will give some brief details of what Kazaa has to offer, but if its an in depth opinion of this program then I am sorry you will have to read other reviews. This is more a case of my personal experience and hopefully a warning to others.

Firstly Kazaa is a file-sharing program that enables any two computers that are using this program to share all files on their computers. In other words they can swap anything, software, music (MP3 etc), video, pictures. So if you want something and it is on another PC you can download it. On an average day their are upwards of 2.5 million users online at any given moment. With that in mind the chances of finding what you want is more than a probability. With Kazaa you also get bullguard, which is an anti virus program.

I decided to download the free version of Kazaa, I did briefly read all the notices and was aware that I would get pop ups, well I have got used to a certain amount of those. All I wanted was a software program, in fact it was an old freeware program, so using Kazaa seemed the ideal tool to use. Having downloaded the program I searched for the program, to my surprise I never did find it. Still now I have got it I might as well have a look around and see what it can do. Well yes it can and does download from other users, I tried a music file, a picture and a funny video, and they all downloaded and were perfectly ok.

With so many users certain adult content type videos can be downloaded, but Kazaa does have a filter and can be password protected to stop children from accessing such things. With Kazaa you also have the choice of what if any files you wish to share with the outside world. So if Kazaa is your type of program so far so good.

Now I am one of those people who clutter up their computers with all sorts of stuff
. If I am honest I cannot remember what a lot of the things do. Having said that I do try and keep my pc running as smoothly as possible. Yes I do have anti virus stuff and yes I use it and keep it updated. Having had Kazaa for a few days I noticed that Kazaa itself was not too stable and would often do an illegal activity and shut down (I don’t know what it did, but it kept on doing it and shutting down). Then I was finding my PC would totally freeze on me. I would not be able to connect to the Internet without restarting the PC. A lot of this I blamed on my poor PC housekeeping.

That was until I tried to do an Internet search and found I was being given strange results, for instance I wanted some train times and got places where I could buy toy trains. If I was a new user then I would have thought it was the search engine, but I do know a little better than that. A closer look and I realised although I was using the MSN search bar on Internet explorer the results were coming back from a search engine called my shopping. That was not down to me. I tried to reset my settings on the PC, but still I would find my searches hijacked.

Things got worse I was soon finding strange programs trying to access the Internet. Pages were taking longer and longer to load although my hard drive seemed to be working its socks off. Now if I had broadband I might not have noticed the slow down, but having a dial up connection that is slow at the best of times I really did notice.

Then Internet Explorer became more or less unusable. At this point I started to put two and two together and realised that it must have something to do with Kazaa. In fact the problem is not Kazaa itself, its all the other prog
rams that are bundled with the free version. Add to that the fact that downloading from other computers can also mean you download spyware programs and other programs that are called thiefware.

My solution was not that easy to achieve, it involved firstly deleting Kazaa, then downloading a program (I will write an opinion on the program I used) to help me trace all the programs that should not be on my PC, getting rid of them and finally resetting and downloading updates to try and get my PC working as it did prior to my flirtation with Kazaa.

So for any of you thinking of using this program do be aware there is no such thing as a free lunch. Kazaa do offer another version without the add on programs, but you have to pay for this. I personally have had too bad a time to consider using it, so I cannot tell you what it is like.

Summary: