My favourite toy has now gone (WinMX)

Member Name: FairyWBO

Product:	WinMX
Date:	04/02/04 (1298 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You get a load of music

Disadvantages: They have removed it from use

Don't bother reading this now, as they have taken it away.... I will leave the review here though, just incase anyone is interested in what they have missed, and because it's not everyday I get a crown for something :o)


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I had Morpheus to get all my MP3's and such like before, but I was being driven insane by the endless pop-ups and it freezing all the time. I was going to go back to Kazaa, that I had in the past but found they have a small charge now.. and being a tight wad I hate paying for things. Wishing that AudioGalaxy was still about (something I loved dearly and miss on a almost daily basis) I happened to ask out loud "Why can't there be a free, easy way to nick stuff?" to no-one in general. My son's mate came up with WinMx.... seeing as he is always here I forgot he was in the room while I was talking to myself :o)

I dutifuly went to the site WWW.WINMX.COM to find out more.

They have no pop ups.. YAY

They don't charge..... YAY

They are a sharing site..... YAY

After lots of confirmation about lack of pop-ups, spyware, viruses and other such stuff I headed for the download page. There were several to download, all the same but mirror sites so if one was busy any of the others could be used. The first one I picked wasn't busy and I had it all downloaded and installed in about 5 minutes. The version for downloading was v3.31, so this isn't a new thing.

During the installation I was given the option to have a black background with coloured writing or a white one.... of course I went for black, had to read an agreement twice, tell it what folders I wanted to share and what types of file I wanted to share. I also had to think of a user name which they automatically stuck numbers on the end of.

As soon as it opened itself after installing I was amazed how quickly it read through all the stuff I said I would share with it. (I had over 1.5 GB of MP3's on my clapped out PC!). Then it was time for me too play :o)

I went strait to search.... my eldest son wanted anything by Syd Barrett but particulary Effervesing Elephant... so I typed in Syd and Elephant.... (easiest bits too
spell).. and voila! There was two. Right clicked on both of them and soon they were both downloading.

This was fun..... I tried again.. Just with Syd Barrett this time and loads came up. I was right clicking away like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunatly not all downloaded, but they never do!

As I was now bored of Barrett I wanted to try something else...... I asked someone I was chatting to at the time on MSN (even my poor clapped out, over stuffed PC could run the two at once) to name a song, they did, I did a search and eventually found some more to play with.

As soon as some had downloaded I thought I had lost them though, but it was just the timer on the options section, which I soon put right.

It lets you go to the folder you downloaded them into, so as soon as one had finished I opened it and had it playing away in the background :o)

My PC was doing three things at once and not suffering :o)

It did have a stutter attack at one point but that was when I tried to do a fourth thing... so it was my fault and I stopped doing it :oP

While I was happily "nicking" stuff, people were happily doing the same back. You can have upto 6 uploads and 6 downloads going at the same time. I am on Broadband though so maybe through a modem it would be less.

The songs that worked didn't take long to download and although one was only the first 59 seconds of a song, the sound quality was great. The short one was my fault....... I should have noticed it had a % sign next to it to indicate it wasn't a full song!

If you do start downloading something and you have to turn off the PC, it comes back the next time you run WinMx which is very handy (just as long as the person you were downloading from happens to be still there) and even if they aren't someone else with that file might be about so you can carry on getting it from them instead.

I have even had to now change it ove
r from my old PC to my new PC and that was a painless process, and seems to work even better as I have more RAM and I can easily do 5 things with no stutters or hiccups at all. (It is happily running in the background as I type this.) And I have even more hard drive to fill up with music.. so there is no stopping me now. On my last count I had nearly 6GB just of songs :oP

And I find it very easy to use. Even better is the fact that there really are no pop-ups :o)

It also has a chat facility (sort of like instant messages, but they vanish as soon as you answer them), after a while of not knowing what on earth it was for I have become quite addept at answering peoples plea's to move their requested song to the download list or even to chat about the size of my Schenker collection!

They do also have chatrooms, which I bravely went in the other day.... many are just rude.. but that's nothing new, and half don't even chat.. they must just sit there starting at a blank screen all night! But I did manage to find one helpful chappy to answer a question I had (helpful in the fact that he actually answered me, rather than answered my question though.lol).

You can have away messages up, so if someone does feel the need to chat, you don't have if you don't want to. Also there are options on it to regulate who you can get messages from... it can be from anyone that has winmx, or just people that are actually downloading stuff from you, or you from them.

Another good thing about the chat facility is that when someone is downloading your stuff you can browse all the stuff they are sharing rather than doing a search and "nick" anything you feel like from them, this helps avoid the queues that can form when too many people want the same stuff at the same time.

Like all these kind of shared sites it all depends if someone happens to be on it at the same time as you with the stuff you want, but so far
I haven't found any major problems, as there seems to be loads of people using this.

And it's not just MP3's that you can get.. I just discovered that games are on there too.. and pictures and films.. any old stuff that people are willing to share can be found if you search hard enough, but be warned, when moving from the MP3 to pastures new, not all is always what it seems and you could end up with porn on your PC.. unless you want porn that is, I am sure some do, just I don't.. so I will stick with the MP3's and the occasional game.

It does seem to be virus checked, but again, you should be on the look out for anything that seems a bit dodgy just in case.

If I do find anything else out I will let you know, but so far I feel I have found the P2P site for me.

Happy hunting
:o)

Not sure what the ratings below mean... do they mean Dooyoo or WinMx? Ah well, I answered anyway!

Summary: It was a brilliant P2P but now it is no more

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