Great file sharing. (Limewire)

Member Name: chembleton

Product:	Limewire
Date:	25/07/02 (6842 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simple to use, Nearly always find files I want

Disadvantages: Sometimes connection speeds are slow

For those who don't yet know, there are websites and file sharing programs on the internet that allow a user to connect to other users and share files between their PC's. These are most commonly used to download music to your hard drive which can then be listened to and put onto a CD if one has a CD writer. The most commonly talked about file sharing site has to be Napster.

I first got into Napster around the time when it was in the news. Download music to your hard drive I thought? Sounds good. I gave it a try and found it easy to use and I could usually find what I wanted. Then when it started to go to a pay site I looked for other file sharing programs to use. I tried briefly Morpheus but then I found Limewire.
Morpheus was a little fiddly for me with too many buttons and stuff and I couldn't always connect to it immediately.

I had heard someone mention it at work so I did a little search for it. Limewire took only five or so minutes to download and set up before being able to search freely for music, video, images and programs.

The user interface is very easy to operate. Installing is a matter of clicking 'next' each time the computer asks, filling out a few details and restarting once. When launched, searching for music or whatever is very easy. You can search music by title, artist or album. I have pretty varied taste from Nirvana, Stone Roses to early 80's stuff like Flock of Seagulls (!), or dance music from early 90's to current Limewire usually always finds what I want within a few seconds. If I can't find it, I try again later in the hope that someone who has it is on their pc. In the end I usually quickly find what I want.
Depending on your internet connection (I have broadband) tracks don't take particularly long to download. A typical 4 minute song takes about a minute to download. You can set it up to download many simultaneous songs, while only allowing others to upload few from
yourself (if you have any in your shared folder - I usually remove mine to elsewhere on my hard drive to stop them as it can slow down your speed, selfish I know!).
Being on broadband is best for downloading music or video though I used to do it via a modem, you just have to be more patient.
You can double click songs that are in the middle of downloading to hear what you've downloaded so far. This is useful and saves time if you're not sure you're downloading the right song you're after.

One great thing is the ability to download video. I've downloaded many music videos and films such as Spiderman, Star Wars Ep 2, Monsters Inc. These files are huge though and take many hours even on broadband, so a modem here would be useless. Yes other sites offer this too but I find Limewire offers better quality movies. Again here you can double click a download to see what you've downloaded so far.

I can't review the downloading of programs because I wouldn't recommend it as it's easy to pick up a virus by downloading programs - from any file sharing program.

I can't really directly compare all the other file sharing programs to Limewire as I've never tried many others as I find Limewire so easy to use and great at providing the files I want. Like I said earlier I found Morpheus too fiddly IMHO but other people may find it ok.

* A useful tip when downloading... Sometimes you lose a connection and instead of it saying 'downloading from...' it says 'waiting' or 'requery sent'. I usually type a new search for the same song again (without 'killing' the existing download) and it usually picks someone else up who has the same file and it'll resume from the point it left off. Often it will find multiple hosts and download from 2, 3 or 4 hosts making it much faster.

Give Limewire a go at www.limewire.com and I'm sure you'll like it.

Thank
s for reading.

Summary: