KaZaA has taken the place of Napster in the minds of many music lovers. The peer-to-peer system lets users exchange files of any type, including MP3s. With over 78 million downloads, the chance of other users with files you want being on line is rather high.

To start with, KaZaA designates a specific directory on your hard drive to share. Usually this is called My Shared Folder. ONLY things in this folder can be accessed by the outside world. This makes security easy - anything in that folder can be seen. Anything NOT in that folder CANNOT be seen.

Therefore, to share files with others, simply drop them into that folder! Any files you download from other people will arrive in that folder as well. This means, if you leave files in that folder, that over time everybody will be sharing more and more files.

To edit the details of the files in your Kazaa folder; in the kazaa program go to "My kazaa" in the top left of the screen. Click on "All" or whatever type of program your trying to edit the details of. find the file in the list, right click it and go to "Edit details." Here you can edit the description and the keyword of the file.

To help speed up searching, kazaa employs "supernodes" - super-fast systems that contain indices of nearby machines. Searchers check these supernodes for information on which system holds what. Then, they go to a particular hard drive to get the content. This means your computer isn't polled constantly for searches. It's only accessed when someone really wants content that you have.

For families that use kazaa, it can be set up to ignore any porn or otherwise objectionable files.

When you download a file from someone else's computer, kazaa optimizes the download to use the fastest machine available - or even to use multiple machines if it can find them!

The participation level matters as well. The higher your participation level is, the better kazaa's performance will be.

Highly recommended for file swap fans.

It is also highly recommended that you have a virus checker on your system because since these are files from other people's computer's and they're not tested so there could be a virus on it. I have been using kazaa for a while and I would say 1 out of 20 downloads have a virus on it (usually in the software section of kazaa). This is the only downer, but you should be alright if you have a good virus checker. (I have Norton Anitvirus and that works for me)

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