If you are looking to have the download capabilities that comes with the peer 2 peer world, while at the same time keep your computer healthy and clean, here are some tips that I use at home:

In our example, we'd take eMule. eMule has hundreds of distributions and many websites offer you the option to download the "best tweaked version" fromtheir website. Most of these "tweaked" versions are repackaged by these website's owners and are usually changed to use your bandwidth to share the website's content with other clients and websites, thus provide "better results" to it's customers, while consuming all of your bandwidth.

Did you notice your surfing is much slower lately?

Many of these distributions also install spyware that sends your passwords and credit card information to malicious users. So how do I protect my date, bandwidth and computer?

What I do is always run my machine with a personal firewall (the one that comes with SP2), install an Anti Virus that updates it's pattern file regularly, and Windows Defender as an online anti-spyware solution. But this is just the basics.

After that I install Virtual PC on my machine. Virtual PC is a software component that allows you to install additional operating systems and applications into your computer as virtual machines. This actually opens a window with BIOS loading and everything. I then install Windows XP as a virtual machine inside my computer, and install eMule onto it. This way, my physical machine is completely protected, while the virtual machine is the one that is risked.

I install eMule directly from the eMule project servers and not from any other website. The eMule project website is located here. You can download your localized version from this location.

I also enable a feature of Virtual PC called "Undo disks". this means that once I've installed Windows XP SP2 and eMule onto the virtual machine, I enable undo disks and all of my changes from now on are saved aside. If I get a virus, or malware, I simply click a button and discard all of my changes, going back to the basic image of Windows XP and eMule.

Since eMule keeps track of your sharing history and gives you score accordingly - which enables you to download faster, using this methodology promises you that your eMule will always keep it's score because you never reinstall it.

The last benefit of using eMule under a Virtual PC image is that it is saved as a single VHD file. This way you can always copy this 2-4GB file from one PC to another and run it with all of your eMule scoring Etc.

If you want to save your bandwidth for other tasks, you simply pause the Virtual Machine or close it.

Have any comments? Let me know.