You may have noticed that filesizes of material up for sharing can vary. I've been disappointed myself with MP3s I thought I had listened to all the way through – although on this occasion I'd burnt a CD from someone else's machine in a hurry and may not have – only to find they cut off before the end.

One way to avoid passing this disappointment on is to not share incomplete downloads.

But a good way to avoid this happening in the first place is to take a moment to check out which of the various versions with the same name has the largest file size listed as a property, as LW only lists them as multiple copies when all their properties correspond.

Checking the file size is a good way to go about doing this as it's entirely possible for the original sharer to have a copy uploaded that ends up partial but is then shared with 20 or so other sharers, given the way connections blip in and out light fairy lights and you can never guarantee any host is always logged on.

Obviously there are posts on these forums concerning malewarez with distinctive filesizes but, as these sizes generally tend to come in as a lot smaller than genuine MP3s downloading the biggest seems a reasonably effective method for improving the probability of downloading a complete recording as well as avoiding worms, trojans and keyloggers.

But there are no guarantees, other than listening to everything before burning it to a CD, as the following confabulation seeks to illustrate:

In her lunch-hour Anne, an underappreciated secretary providing speed typing and advanced copyediting consultancy services to faculty members in a UK university, uploads a bootleg of Xtina live an admirer who does front-of-house engineering at a UK stadium took straight from the desk onto MP3 via LW and sent her via e-mail.

Meanwhile Bob, a Xtina obsessive in NY, 5 hours behind, logs in during his lunch-hour and uses LW to scan for new material. Seeing the Xtina bootleg he sets it to download then leaves the office to get some food.

Anne is about to go on vacation and has a lot of e-mail to get through at the end of her working day, including proofs of a paper she's typed up that has to be peer-reviewed by the department heads prior to being sent to a journal, so she redirects her upload bandwidth away from LW to ensure she can get off on time. This bumps Bob's connection off at 80%.

Then she shuts down her machine, heads home, packs her suitcase and spends a fortnight on the golden sands of the Carribbean.

Bob comes back from his lunch-hour and e-mails everybody he knows that he's got this cool rare bootleg available via LW, but, having got back a little late, gets straight back to his duties without spotting it's incomplete.

21 people over the course of the afternoon put in a keyword search and only Bob's version shows. But, because LW just checks every bit available, their versions all register that what's available has downloaded 100%. Bob stays late after work and discovers he's got an incomplete version but, because Anne's now on vacation, he can't connect to the source again.

Anne comes back off holiday and sets LW going as normal but, because there are 22 sources blipping in and out that hold an 80% version of the track, hardly anyone downloads hers as it rates so low on the search results...