9. Shereaza And Xolox

Summary: Shereaza and Xolox are are the new kids on the block when it comes to large P2P communities. Shareaza can find and download files shared by EDonkey2000, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Gnutella2 (G2) users and Xolox can search and download from fMorpheus, Gnutella, Kazaa, eDonkey, iMesh, Overnet, Grokster, Limewire, and G2 users.

Figure 9: Shareaza User Interface (click to enlarge)

Speed: While the multi-network idea sounds good, reality was disappointing. For some reason, the only network working with Xolox was eDonkey and so downloads could not be established without waiting for a long period of time. Shereaza seemed to have a similar problem. So I waited for 30 minutes for each one of these programs to start a download, but in the end quit without downloading anything.

Variety of Content: With multi-network access, should be large. I found three Red vs. Blue files on Shereaza and 20 or 30 on Xolox.

Figure 10: Xolox User Interface (click to enlarge)

Comments: The searches were extremely slow. Even though these programs are cleaner of adware and don't do anything sneaky (at least that I could detect) they are not yet mature at providing fast downloads; at least with my router configuration and location. I did everything short of setting up a DMZ on my router to let the downloads through but in the end got nowhere.

I will keep an eye on these programs since they some day may challenge their big brothers for the crown. With the limited results I got, however, I would suggest waiting. As a side note I might have had trouble establishing connections with these programs as a result of having already installed applications that access the same networks. Also note that Xolox occasionally locked up on me and had to be Ctrl+Alt+Deleted.