LimeWire, a death trap to all PCs

I'm pretty sure a lot of people have been getting viruses, or wondering why their computer is slowing down. I thought it was because of my memory. Although that's not the real full reason, LimeWire is a dangerous maneuever to take hold of because in my eyes, it is on safe and I wouldn't know what to do though without it. I was a little curious when they LimeWire Pro came out, I figured that there would be no viruses whatsoever. But I'm not going to spend $18.88 to find out.

If the Gnutella Network is your playground, then LimeWire is probably your playmate; it’s been the most popular Gnutella client going for years. Although LimeWire is an open-source program, the LimeWire Group offers a Pro version for $18.88, which it claims has more features, more search results, and better speed via a Turbo-charged connection. (The GPL allows for this because the Pro version’s source code is freely available to anyone who wishes to compile it themselves. Good luck with that, though.) But is the $18.88 premium worth it, or is the free LimeWire even worth using at all?

For comparison’s sake I ran both LimeWire versions on two identical virtual machines on the same PC with the same Internet connection. I entered the same searches and downloads in both programs. For searches of popular songs (all legal, of course), both versions came up with almost identical results. The Pro version, however, came up with about 25% more results for more obscure tunes. On average, the Pro version downloaded files about 10 to 15% faster than the free LimeWire version. So, while the advantage goes to LimeWire Pro overall, users of the free version shouldn’t feel like they’re missing out on too much.

Both LimeWire versions offer an appealing feature set. They work through firewalls right out of the box and both optionally integrate with your iTunes music library for easy sharing. Both have an integrated player and can preview partially downloaded multimedia files. In addition, built-in spam filtering automatically removes obviously bogus files from lists, and a porn-blocker prevents adult content from appearing. An intuitive filter system also makes it simple to whittle down a huge list of barely relevant files to a smaller list of files that you may actually want.

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