It’s not often that my youngest son will cry in front of me. The reason? It turns out he was having some trouble with Ares not connecting. Yes I agree, it seems a little trivial and no really something that he should be crying about, but hey, what do I know? I told him he should stop worrying about little things like Ares not connecting and start worrying about getting a job and finding a girlfriend: it’s just not healthy for a 25 year old to be still living with his parents.

So I explained what that the first thing that happens when Ares fires up is that it connects to other nodes in the network. This process of Ares connecting is essential for the software to start sharing its wares.

The problem, it seems, is that versions like Ares Galaxy – the old timers like me – forget which are the ‘good’ nodes and which are the bad ones. When the program starts back up, then it fails to find any decent connections and just doesn’t know where to being.

The problem with Ares not connecting is, thankfully, solved in later versions of Ares (try Ares Ultimate and Ares Vista for a start) and I just pointed him towards those instead of trying to console him. Kids!