Tons of people use Ares Vista to download music, videos and software every day. One of the beautiful things about the Ares Vista software is that It Just Works. No messing, no problems, no issues. But what if it doesn't work first time. What if it works okay, but you'd prefer if it were Turbo Charged? What about getting rid of those little niggles that we all find in our software?

In all of these cases, there's bound to be a solution. That's the wonderful thing about any software that is as popular as Ares Vista: people around the world have collectively used it enough to identify and iron out the wrinkles that inevitably crop up. I have tried to collect some of the most common hints and tips that everyday Ares users might just find useful.

There are usually two main reasons why Ares will not connect to the network: these are i) Firewall or Anti-Virus software, and ii) Your router is blocking the necessary ports.

The Firewall issue can be diagnosed by briefly lowering your security settings and then trying to connect with the Ares network. If you can connect, then it most probably is a firewall issue. Refer to the software instructions in order to fix this problem.

The router issue is due to the ports that Ares requires being blocked. This can be solved with by using a technique called “port forwarding”, where you essentially tell the router to open up the required ports. This helpful site: www.AresVista.com offers some assistance in their 'Support' section.

There are many, many reasons why your files might be taking a long time to download: the most common reasons, though, are the bandwidth of the downloader and the bandwidth of the uploader. There is nothing you can do about the bandwidth of the uploader, and your choices are to be patient(!) or to find another source.

The bandwidth of the downloader (that's you) can be effected by factors such as the number of concurrent downloads that are taking place (that includes downloads that are outside Ares, like YouTube videos, downloading software, or streaming radio. Try closing other applications and seeing if that helps. If you've got a slow connection to the Internet then the solution might be as simple as upgrading that.

This is almost certainly an issue with a missing codec that is required to play the video from an .avi movie; everyone who uses windows will have this problem – or a close variant – at one time or another. Fortunately it's a very easy one to fix: the XVID set is a free set of codecs that can be quickly and easily downloaded and installed (Google the name to find it). Once these are installed you probably won't have any further problems with any other codecs. If you do find that you are have the same problem then once again a quick web search for the codec should solve the issue immediately.

Unfortunately this a fairly common problem caused by windows. Not to worry: it's easily fixed. The most consistent fix is to 'register' the quartz.dll library. When installing (or for some other obscuree reason) the library – which is most definitely required by Windows to play many video files – isn't registered and chaos ensues.

To solve it click Start > Run …. > and type regsvr32 quartz.dll

You should get a message telling you that the file was registered, and you will then be good to go. Easy!

This is an occasional problem caused by the inbuilt Ares audio player not being able to handle some obscure audio file encodings. To solve it, play the file in an external player. To do this, simply right-click on the download in question and chose “Open External” from the list of options. This should open the file in your default audio player – possibly Windows Media Player if you haven't changed it – and you should be able to listen without interruption.

As I mentioned above, Ares is a startlingly popular software application, and if there is a problem, then it has probably been solved somewhere. A quick search on Google could well go a long way to solving your issue within a few minutes. Good luck!

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