FrostWire is in short, a cut-back version of LimeWire, the popular P2P Gnutella client. Whereas LimeWire is full of ads, spam, and is a resource hog, FrostWire is reportedly free of such annoyances. Although FrostWire.com still requires the Java runtime environment, it's a lot less bulky, and takes half the resources of LimeWire. The FrostWire program includes all of the free LimeWire version's functionality, plus a few features of LimeWire Pro's fee based upgrades, such as Turbo Charged Downloads, for free. It also provides a chatroom which is absent in LimeWire. FrostWire's interface is nearly identical to that of LimeWire's since it's based on the same code base, however, the color scheme is slightly different. As in LimeWire, the FrostWire.com skin may also be changed to a variety of different colors. FrostWire is probably one of the easiest P2P applications to use. You load a client, it connects, type what you're looking for and download. The searching and downloading are much faster than with LimeWire.

The major downside to FrostWire.com is that despite streamlining the LimeWire process, Frostwire.com downloads will quickly start to consume between 60-90 percent of your CPU. Frostwire does not understand that you might want to be doing something else while downloading music, seeing as it takes up a lot more system resources than LimeWire. While you might be able to play computer games while LimeWire was downloading, with Frostwire you sometimes had trouble playing games on the Internet. The truth is that although FrostWire.com may have better spam blocking, it lacks in many categories. Another downside is that the program comes bundled with an ASK search engine toolbar, (which the site says is optional). You have to know to use the double tickbox to get rid of it. Some critics have also noted that there are connectivity issues with FrostWire.com as well, but they are in the minority. All in all, despite its drawbacks, FrostWire is a viable alternative to LimeWire if you are going the P2P route.