eMule To The Rescue

I just got a new PC from Mesh computers, complete with an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum soundcard by Creative. Now, of course, the very first thing I did was wipe the hard disk and begin rebuilding the system to suit my own idiosyncratic ways of working. This was going fine, until I discovered that the installation CD for the soundcard was missing. I figured I'd just download another copy from Creative's website, but it turns out Creative don't make the installation CDs available, only driver updates which are useless if you don't have the original CD. Oh, they have the CDs in their online store, but I'm damned if I'm going to pay another £6.90 and wait for the mail to arrive. C'mon Creative, I've just bought a £150 soundcard and £100 speaker system from you - expecting people to pay for replacement software is just petty.

I scoured the web to see if I could find a download of the missing CD anywhere, and found several comments on forums suggesting that the CD is available on P2P networks. My heart sank - when I hear P2P software I think of viruses, hideous GUIs, pop-up browser windows and shortcuts to casinos and porn sites appearing on my desktop out of nowhere. So it was a refreshing change to discover eMule, which has done no evil to my machine, and through which I've managed to easily download the missing software. eMule seems to be P2P software for computer geeks rather than script kiddies, featuring lots of lovely beguiling statistics and chart screens..