How to Use Shareaza to Your Advantage

I've been using Shareaza for years, so I decided to write up a few hints, tips and tricks to help you use Shareaza to your advantage.

First and most importantly, don't upgrade. The newest version may be safer and more secure but it's also slower with less control. You can get the older versions at oldversion.com

Under tools and Shareaza settings is where most of these changes of settings will take place.

In that Shareaza window, you will see many other options we will go through each of them.

I find it best to not auto connect and not start up each time windows starts. I like to start my own programs and I like to connect when I'm ready to. I do like it to prompt before opening URI's though for safety reasons.

Under searches, I have it switch to transfers view on download. That way nothing is filtered by accident.

Settings under Library is personal choice, I do have it set to quick hashing though.

Media player section is very important. Do not allow it to use Shareaza's Media Player to even Windows media player. If you'd like to make sure within less then 1% of your download, that whatever video or audio you are downloading is correct and not a fake, load Mplayer here. Mplayer can be downloaded at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html It's one of the best players on the net for free.

Community is another personal choice section. Many people have chat disabled because spam messages are getting out of hand. I turn mine on and off when I feel like it. A tip here is, if you'd like to get more users to download from, when you see you are one or two even in their queue message them and you may be started at that point. I do this a lot thanking users for the download.

Connection, this is your in and out speed. Often set to automatic, I find leaving it best; however, at the timeouts section I change that to 16 and handshake 45.

Downloads, this section needs to be changed a lot. Change your limits to MAX on both. Number of downloads, change to the max as well. UNCHECK (this is very important tip!) uncheck the only download and upload to networks which are connected. If you have this checked it may take you a lifetime to download.

Uploads section, this can be a personal choice section too all depending how concerned you are about getting caught sharing files. You can delete all the queues and even limit them by clicking on one, selecting edit, and changing each network to whatever you desire.

Remote access is good if you want to set it up with the ability to use it from another location.

Scheduler I never used.

Networks, click on the actual word networks, and tick all three boxes. The more networks you are connected to the better your chances at getting your file faster.

Gnutella make sure both network 1 and 2 are ticked to connect always as well as today.

eDonkey select always connect and connect today. Make sure receive and update is ticked and raise your connect limit to hirer then the default.

Click Apply and Ok.

If you are interested in downloading movies, or screeners you should search for "sharethefiles" and "DVDSCR" and be sure to make it change to video so you are able to get the video files.

After you have found a file you want to download, go over to the transfer's window and click on the file you selected to download. Right click on it and select "find more sources". After you have done that some sources will be picked up and you will see a + beside the file, click that to drop down all the sources in your downline. After you see all your sources in your download click anywhere in there and press control A (this select alls) then right click and select "access". This will attempt to start some the file to download. If you start to notice a drop in speed do this again.

After a while, you will notice some users in your downline and you will be marked as one. If they are on edonkey message them to get started, but as I said, you must be marked as one.

After you have a small percent the file, select preview. If it says "this media has been blocked to view it download the player at blah blah blah". That's a fake the player is spyware so don't bother. Simply delete the file and select another. Many times the reviews of files are lies. Therefore, I don't even bother reading them and it only takes a few seconds to download 1% and screen the file.

If you are a first time user, be sure to read my article on the fake Shareaza.