An
extremely frustrating program for users on a
56k Modem, as mentioned above. Not only do large
files take
exorbinant amounts of
download time, but simply
connecting to the user with the file can take in upwards of two
minutes. Quite frustrating.
As dr3w mentioned above, there is a little program that KaZaA installs. This, however, is supposedly not the only one. It is meant to contain a treasure trove of wonderful Spyware, which we all love! For those of us who don't like little advertisement programs and Spyware, we can all download KaZaA Lite. Cracked by an anonymous Russian do-gooder, KaZaA Lite has all the features from KaZaA minus the unsavoury programs and Spyware.
Note: Zerotime has enlightened me that running Ad-Aware and replacing the cd_clint.dll with a clean one does much the same thing as the "lite" version. The lite version, however, does seem to be faster than the normal.
KaZaA Lite can be found at: www.kazaalite.com.
After reading
rawden's write up below, I thought I might
post a little warning about those "3 or 4 certain files with names that I have never heard of, bear seemingly no relation to what I typed into the seach box, and have a strange gold icon". Those gold icon files are a new
money making scheme developed by
Sharman Networks. It is quite clever actually, and these are files posted by their
advertisers. They download at the full speed of your connection, without wavering or having to worry about getting
multiple sources as they are being uploaded from a
dedicated commercial server, however, there is a catch - as there always is. You might
download it quickly, but its going to be a waste of your time, especially on 56k, because they're
hefty downloads. I assume this is because they are
full quality, but they could just be
riddled with more
spyware (perhaps both).
Anyhow, even after you have completely downloaded it, moved it anywhere on your hard drive you like, each individual download has a special codec required for it to work. Therefore, when you attempt to play this file (I have only downloaded a gold file once, and it was a movie), it launches your player, begins loading, but then pops up with a nice little box informing you that this will cost X american dollars to download the correct codec in order to view it. The particular movie I downloaded, Chopper, demanded US$15 for its viewing. This particular file could not use the Kazaa preview feature, although I later tried it with another gold file and it still demanded payment.
Therefore, if you aren't bothered about paying for it, these gold files aren't bad, as they download at full speed, and may be of exceptional quality, but also may be riddled with spyware. If you do mind paying, then don't download them or you'll waste your bandwidth.