7. LimeWire

Summary: Many have tried to master downloading on the Gnutella file sharing system but LimeWire is the champ. This program provides faster download rates than Morpheus, but without having to deal with ads. The downside is a slightly smaller (although still decent-sized) user base, with 85 million downloads from Download.com.

Figure 6: LimeWire User Interface with Search in progress (click to enlarge)

Speed: With a popular file, a rate of 60 kB/s can be easily maintained. I agree with LimeWire's claim that they are the fastest with the exception of a torrent file that has been given time to rev up to 200 kB/s or a direct connect client. The program was able to complete 50% of single user downloads of Red vs. Blue files.

Variety of Content: This program found 4 DVR-MS files.

Comments: Searches are slow but the categorization scheme on the site more than makes up for this. If you look up anything after the search you can filter by media or album. LimeWire had started to be overrun by junk files a while back and now lets the users label files as junk by right-clicking. This helped restore LimeWire to being one of the best P2P programs on the market.

Negatives are that LimeWire prompts you to purchase the PRO version, which is supposed to be faster. It also minimizes to the system tray when you try to close it and automatically starts up with your computer. At least LimeWire is nice enough to give you a check box during set up to disable auto startup, instead of making you hunt through the options menu. LimeWire is Java based , so it loads slowly, but once loaded seems fast enough.