Hi.

I've been playing around with limewire 1.3 for about a week now. Nice program, nice UI.

Just struggling with one big issue (there are smaller ones, but one at a time...

Probably a Gnutella issue more than a limewire issue, but....
I'm finding when I download, I search, find maybe 20 - 30 results, but if I try to download (any number - just 1 or all of them), about 98% of the time or so, they are "busy". The other 2% are fine, but I have to search several times a day to find 1 to download. I've left large numbers of "busy" files retrying for hours and I've never seen one file go from busy to start downloading. Is this just the nature of the beast or is there a problem? What does busy *really* mean? Is there some configuration in my client which means people are "banning" me? (the settings are mostly default - I've just put in my true IP, as I'm on a LAN). I have about 150 MP3's shared.

I'm behind a firewall - does that make a difference? (keeping in mind I *have* successfully downloaded a few files, just not many). 6346 is open.

Cheers,

m00n1

it may very well be that the person you are connecting to is busy for that long... I used to share movies over gnutella... but then it dawned on me how stupid that was... Here I was putting 650MB files available for download and I only have 15KB/s upload... it litterally took days for someone to get one of the movies... so I unshared them and now my MP3's and simpsons episodes are what I share...so basically people could be sharing huge files and that means you may never get on. The other thing is if you notice the busy signal comes with a time stamp... This means that gnutella is going to try again in this many seconds. But as you wait longer the duration increases so... if someone sneaks into use a download slot while your waiting 100s for a busy signal... you've just lost your window and the next time you try back you don't get in...

You will have better download success if you only attempt to download from "4 star" and "3 star" people. To the left of each file name, there are stars. Sort by stars and your downloads will improve.

Buck

The reason why most people get busy signals is because there are far less users making files available to people than there are users who just want to grab everything they can like freeloaders. People need to take their CD collection of songs or movies or texts and download a reasonable amount into their shared folder. This would give another downloader more users to select from when they want a specific file; thus, eliminating the torment of relying on the only one person that has that one file you want more than anything, but can't get because everyone else is waiting to download from him too. Oh yeah, to all you users with 56K modems, please be kind enough NOT to try and download movies or lenghty videos from other users; you'll probably get a "could not download" message before the transaction's even a third done. I'm only trying to relate to people that they need to make files available by inputting them into their computer and not just depending on downloading from everyone else.