You can share your music and other files with other people online by installing a P2P program on your internet-connected computer.

Doing this lets other people get files from your PC - and you can get their stuff too.

So if you want other people to listen to the recordings you've made of your kids playing the violin, or have an easy way to get the latest music, P2P is the way to go.

What's P2P?

P2P is short for 'peer to peer'. It's a bit different from the web. When you look at a web page then the program you use, or browser, gets it from a web server.

Whatever browser you use - Netscape, Internet Explorer or Opera - just asks for the page it wants and shows it on your screen.

If you want to have your own web pages then you've got to get a server of your own, or pay someone else to let you use theirs.

With a peer to peer program your computer can get stuff from other places, but it can also hand over files that it is asked for, acting like a server too.

How to choose?

There are lots of different P2P programs out there. Each works in a slightly different way, but they all do roughly the same thing.

They make your computer part of a worldwide collection of computers which are sharing files.