Shareaza has aggravated my computer's schizophrenia!

[MacTerminator]

As a studio musician's main tool my Mac laptop lives a very traumatic lifestyle. It gets whisked between home, rehearsal rooms and studios where it's blasted at earbleeding volume by everything from Jazz to Death Metal. It gets connected to scary hardware with 70s sci-fi-style flashing lights and meters and miles of cables sprouting from every orifice as well as being gawped at by Folkies and Metalheads.

Add to that my gradual transition between OS9 and OSX which is rather like brain surgery being done in installments. Hey, imagine what it'll be like when they start implanting digital interfaces in people's brains - they'll have to employ a little bloke to go around rebooting people whenever they freeze in the middle of the street.....sorry, I digress. Anyway, apart from these two OSs, I also have Virtual PC installed with Win2K to do bits and pieces that I don't have Mac software for. Imagine continuously hearing voices in your head in two languages you don't understand - that's how my computer feels!

Up until now it hasn't been too bad. I still mostly use OS9 (almost none of my favourite audio software is available for OSX yet..grrr!) and I only occasionally delve into OSX and Win2K. But now I've discovered the excellent Shareaza and have adopted v1.5 as my main client which means I'm now continuously swapping between Win2k and Mac OS to see how my downloads are going while I'm working. On some particularly sadistic days I've actually had all three OSs booted up simultaneously (OSX with OS9 in Classic mode and VPC running with Win2k) though it has to be said that that setup is not terribly efficient. My poor computer is going to end up like Sybil , the famous American schizophrenic girl with 16 personalities! If I decided to install Linux as well, I think the G4 chip would simply expire with a puff of smoke.

Incidentally, I also tried running Limewire in Windows - ie. Limewire on top of Java on top of Win2k on top of VPC on top of Mac OS. SSSSSLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!