Can somebody suggest a good, free file search/download/share utility that won't gum up my Windows computer with a ton o' spyware?

September 21, 2004 1:54 PM

Can somebody suggest a good, free file search/download/share utility that won't gum up my Windows computer with a ton o' spyware?
posted by alumshubby to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Kazaa Lite or Bit Torrent
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:01 PM on September 21, 2004

Direct Connect or SoulSeek.
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 2:02 PM on September 21, 2004

Kazaa Lite itself isn't full of spyware, but there are tons of crap files with virus droppers, trojans, and spyware on the FT network. The net result for the unwary user will be much the same.

What you want is Azureus to download the torrents that you get by poking around on Google.
posted by majick at 2:15 PM on September 21, 2004

edonkey
posted by SpaceCadet at 5:44 PM on September 21, 2004

I'm a fan of Shareaza. Crappy name. Good client. It uses Gnutella, Gnutella 2, and eDonkey. Also supports Bit Torrent. And it's open source. And pretty.

Sometimes I touch myself at night while thinking about it.
posted by billybunny at 5:52 PM on September 21, 2004

Thanks, all.

Had a very nasty experience with eDonkey 2000. It polluted my system with a lot of spyware, and, in cleaning it off, I broke my winsock32.dll.
posted by alumshubby at 5:04 AM on September 22, 2004

Depends on what you want. Direct Connect (or DC++ or Reverse Connect) is great for community specific stuff (i.a.: comic books, 3d models, bootlegs) once you know where to get the stuff you want. The mods are a little bit high maintenance, and you can get kicked for searching to often, not putting some arbitrary string in your user name, etc.

Ares Lite and Soulseek are great for finding and downloading mp3s, though you might have a problem with the not so popular stuff.

Shareaza, IME, has a ton of content, but takes forever to download (though I know there are ways to speed it up, I haven't been bothered to figure them out).
posted by signal at 2:23 PM on September 22, 2004

And Bit-Torrent (or any clone) is fabulous for recent releases, movies, games, albums, etc. Not so great for older/less popular stuff.
posted by signal at 2:24 PM on September 22, 2004