bs i working auesume! i am satisfied with it so far. but not to many results for my taste of music. probably because she only had one hit single. but my other favorite music brings a lot of results. and i have a old version of bs. when i click on the icon it says the version of bearshare has expired. when i go through bearstart it opens. am i always suppose to go through bearstart?

Yes. For the old betas that's the only way. If you get tired of that you can try
the old ad-supported versions, thgough the performance would be slightly lower.

i hardly get any results. maybe its my taste of music. but when you see information it says newer or older versions of bs. or it says lw. can you still dl from that host

You can download from anything that shows up.

Aaron i posted my beardiag results on http://www.technutopia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2753

is it a firewall problem i thought it wasnt but it might be.

if you are having trouble getting search results with BS, then there is indeed something wrong...I have found it to consistently blow away LW in most all forms of 'performance', so to me it sounds like you have some underlying problem

the music i want isnt very well known. but all the other artists i like show a lot of results. no one uploads from me. but they will on lw. and im sharing the same songs

Bearshare is just a copy of emule but 10x worse... Get emule and see how happy you are now!

lets face some facts here...

firstly, emule doesn't even use the gnutella network (cept for Shareaza's ability to join in on emule files), hence comparing it like 'Bearshare is just a copy of emule but 10x worse' in this discussion is pointless and just spam....

secondly, gnutella clients are well known to kinda gravitate towards likeness, hence LW users will see mostly LW sources in their search results, BS will see mostly BS users in search results, etc....

it appears to this reader that garbagefan2's statement of 'the music i want isnt very well known. but all the other artists i like show a lot of results. no one uploads from me. but they will on lw. and im sharing the same songs' is a result of this tendency for like clients to cluster together...the underlying theme of this concept being that apparently LW users are more likely to be sharing and uploading these files...note the subsection of the above quote 'but all the other artists i like show a lot of results'...obviously (to me at least) 'more common' files show better results with BS than LW, yet the specialized tastes of garbagefan2 are more present with LW..

in general, most files being shared on p2p are all over...BS users, LW users, emule users, FastTrack users, BT users, etc...they all usually come from the same sources originally (private FTP servers) and slowly spread through most all the networks...files of 'less' popularity will tend to be seen on 'localized' areas of the net that 'specialize' in such tastes...

Actually, on BearShare I see a fairly representative mix of sources. That is,
slightly more LimeWire than BearShare sources, followed by Shareaza and
peppered with the rest.

Between BearShare and Limewire The difference is mostly that the odds are a
bit under one hop lower (out of roughly 3.5 hops on average) that rare files on
exclusively one type of servent's leaf nodes can be found in a single
search by the other type. Not a big factor until it's a file you want.

With rare files BearShare has a strong advantage because it can also search
by hash. It's larger query routing tables also cut waste traffic to a fraction of
what comes through LimeWire's 64 KB.

Knowing this, you can cover the odds by searching more often and starting up
a copy of the other one. Put it into ultrapeer mode, connect to the one
already running and search with both. Your odds of downloading go up.

When you're not actually there, let it continue sharing in the background.
Your odds of sharing go up.

Stay permanently on line like that and your odds start looking pretty good.