please help me - downloading music

[shortylilly]

can someone please please please help me! i live in university halls of residence and i am trying to find a suitable program to download music from, but the problem is that when i use limewire or winmx it keeps saying trying to connect/connecting, but fails to do so. im not sure, but i think it might have something to do with a firewall. i have turned off the windows xp firewall, but yet it still says it cannot connect. i have vcom virus protector on my laptop, but i cannot find where to stop the firewall on this, (if it does have one). also, my dad recently installed belkin wireless thingy on my laptop, could this have anything to do with it, as my limewire was working beforehand. any suggestions would be very very welcome! i would appreciate any help. thanking you in advance!

[Postdog]

I dunno about Belkin, but the router I had when I had two computers running (can't remember the name, but it's not Belkin and is pretty well known) DID have a built in firewall, so maybe Belkin has too.

[Machecoul]

Are you connecting through the university? They could be barring access to such sites.

[fo3nix]

It's likely that they might be banning access.

Try downloading a bit torrent client, such as Azureus. On this you can change the port number that it uses: change it to something like 49252 from the original 6881 (or something like that anyway).

Then goto http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/index.html, download the .torrent file right for your computer, and add it into azureus so you can download it. If this works, then the bitTorrent protocol is not banned by your uni. There are many sites that will let you download music over the bitTorrent protocol, with Azureus.

[dodgyshirt]

Most university internet connectivity is via a proxy server and, quite sensibly, they normally bar downloading anything which is dangerous and/or illegal.As P2P downloading meets both these criteria this is probably why you cannot do it in the halls.

The use of the proxy server will probably block fo3nix's scheme but give it a try as I can't suggest an alternative apart from paying for the downloads and the cheapest site for that is the Russian-based site http://www.allofmp3.com/

[ajmmac]

i agree with what fo3nix and dodgyshirt have suggested but what caused me to hesitate in posting was that shortylilly says that the limewire was working b4hand--ie b4 the belkin wireless connection was set up--maybe u could try reverting to the non wireless set up and check ur limewire again--if it works again it points to a problem with the wireless set up and may well be as postdog suggests a built in firewall in the belkin--normally u can configure the firewall to accept or reject certain sites--also have u checked if any other students have wireless and can they access limewire

[dodgyshirt]

Point taken ajmmac but I was making a second assumption that the uni connection was wired as usual and that the wireless thingy had been installed for home use and was redundant as such. Presumably the thingy was either a USB adaptor or a PCMCIA card,either of which is removable anyway.

Perhaps shortlilly could give a bit more information on this point.