Download Manager

thegamefreak0134 · Post by **thegamefreak0134** » Wed 07 Mar, 2007 6:41 pm

I have a dial-up connection here at home, so downloading large files is a bit of a major inconvinience to me. I've managed to circumvent this a little by using a P2P program, but it's so incredibly difficult to find anything useful with one of those. I am thus looking into a download manager. Since there are numerus "accelerators" and other garbage programs out there, I figured I would be better off with a community recommendation.

I basically need something that will allow me to download large files regardless of connection strength. I have issues with firefox in this regard, as it really likes to end downloads prematurely, telling me that my file is complete when only half of it is there. I share this phone line with another person in the house, so the possibility if getting bumped off is pretty high. I don't really care for acceleration because I do not believe in it, mainly. (Connect me to as many proxy servers as you like, I still have a 56k limit on transfer rate. ^_^)

Anywho, open to suggestions here. Yes I've googled it, that's why I'm asking for advice.

-thegamefreak

hop · Post by **hop** » Wed 07 Mar, 2007 7:16 pm

Accelleration is 99% marketing 1% technology and 110% malware. All it does is try to use multiple connections (if it can even find any, odds are it can't) so it caps your bandwidth more steadily/reliably. 56k can be filled by everybody and their dog's server so that's not an issue. Forget about it.

For a properly featured download manager I suggest a (very) long time favorite in the industry...

wget

wget manages the connection and downloads best it can. When it fails, you have a partially downloaded file. No biggy.

wget -c

Continues at the end of the file (downloads are always catenation so this works with all http based downloads even if you didn't start the download with wget but with firefox or whatever).

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

Here is a version compiled for Windows:

http://pages.interlog.com/~tcharron/wgetwin.html

Enjoy.

Post by **DarkAuron** » Wed 07 Mar, 2007 9:42 pm

I highly recommend FlashGet for your dialup needs; I used it for years, and I still choose to use it on DSL.

CoBB · Post by **CoBB** » Thu 08 Mar, 2007 7:21 am

I’d also recommend wget.

Post by **benryves** » Thu 08 Mar, 2007 11:12 am

Opera's download manager isn't broken. (Disclaimer: I haven't used Firefox's since Firefox 1, maybe they've finally fixed it). I've used it to download files over a 700bps connection many times (which isn't much fun!) and it has always been able to resume downloads for me.

Download accelerators can work; my old mobile phone's GPRS system would heavily recompress images before they were sent, noticably increasing speed and reducing costs.

hop · Post by **hop** » Thu 08 Mar, 2007 1:06 pm

I had typed up a reply to that here but alas firefox sucks and apparently hitting enter twice can crash it.

In short.

GPRS proxies aren't download managers.

For GPRS its essential and integrated into the system.

For PCs it's crappy malware that uses neglected third party proxies that wouldn't be able to serve a 14.4 modem let alone the hundreds of dsl users from the other side of the world trying to use it to increase their megahurtz. Even if these proxies compress heavily it still isn't enough to counter the horrible horrible speeds external proxies work at.

If you want to browse faster, disable images.

If you want to download faster, get cable.

The only succesfull multi connection way of downloading is bittorent, and even that depends on the seeds.

Post by **benryves** » Thu 08 Mar, 2007 2:11 pm

hop wrote:GPRS proxies aren't download managers.

I never said that they were; I gave an example of how GPRS proxies can speed up the apparent loading of pages by recompressing images and a similar technology can be employed with commerically available download accelerators.

hop · Post by **hop** » Thu 08 Mar, 2007 2:56 pm

I know what you said.

threefingeredguy · Post by **threefingeredguy** » Fri 09 Mar, 2007 12:33 pm

I also recommend Opera. Download Managing is just one of the many features of this fantastic browser. I wouldn't use the BT client though.

hop · Post by **hop** » Fri 09 Mar, 2007 4:16 pm

http://www.utorrent.com/

Best GUI torrent client.

thegamefreak0134 · Post by **thegamefreak0134** » Fri 09 Mar, 2007 4:50 pm

Sheesh... I already mentioned that I could care less for speed. I know my dial-up is going to be slow, I'm used to it. I just needed something that could fix it when it failed, and the first suggestion on the page (wget) is doing that beautifully.

-thegamefreak

PS: I have tried opera, and was never too thrilled with it.

threefingeredguy · Post by **threefingeredguy** » Fri 09 Mar, 2007 4:52 pm

hop wrote:http://www.utorrent.com/

Best GUI torrent client.

Yep, though I also have no problem with Azureus.