Gnutella Forums

Hmm, people who think kazaa is perfect just haven't used it. I use kazaalite as well as xolox. There are pros and cons. kazaa locks up my pc on startup (virus scan - i hope that's all it is anyway). Then there's the pop-up porn ads (and this is kazaalite!) which my girlfriend finds very amusing.

Then the participation level thing, which leaves some files impossible to download because higher graded users (who in theory share more files) bump you off the files holders list. Actually they just download a cheat vers. of kazaa to get a permanently high partic. level and share nothing of their own. So with popular files, honest users share for 2 hours to boost partic. level and then maybe can get 1 file back - not great. The other problem with this is that, to boost levels people will label say, a home movie of their cat as `pammy & tommy lee' so people will download it to boost their participation, and mislabel bad files generally. Also many bad audio files (loops or a mishmash of samples), which I have not found on xolox. So altogether it can be a headache. Even so however i obviously still quite like it or i would not continue to use it, and it has good points; many detailed search options for example which in theory are quite useful.

Xolox meanwhile does not have the above problems, but it has others - for example i can't get connected first time at the moment, always have to exit and start again. And people don't seem happy with the latest version so I won't try that til problems have been ironed out.

Using both xolox and kazaa though i have found more than once a file on one network and not another, or downloadable on 1 and not the other so it seems wise to use both, even if neither are perfect.

In the end there's only 1 perfect p2p application, and that's `sneakerware' - you just go round a friends house and simply say `please can i borrow your cd, dvd, game' etc.! (don't try this unless you do actually have some friends of course). If you try anything else it's best to be cool and just be patient about things. It is all free anyway.