Tom's Guide: 15 Download Managers & Accelerators

[JMcEntegart]

Check out Tom's Guide's latest round up of download management clients.

Tom's Guide: 15 Download Managers & Accelerators : Read more

 

[teh_chem]

What, are we back in the 90's?

 

[_Cosmin_]

I hate when they put in news link to other page where you can read the news itself.

 

[Pherule]

[citation][nom]teh_chem[/nom]What, are we back in the 90's?[/citation]

Not everyone has blazing fast 100/100Mb/s connections. Not everyone has uncapped. Those who don't, can't afford to have a huge file cut out halfway through downloading.

About the managers themselves, I've tried several, and Orbit seems to be the best.

Btw, Toms, torrent clients shouldn't really be classified as download managers. Also, uTorrent is no longer lightweight; you should take that into consideration.

 

[teh_chem]

[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]Not everyone has blazing fast 100/100Mb/s connections. Not everyone has uncapped. Those who don't, can't afford to have a huge file cut out halfway through downloading.About the managers themselves, I've tried several, and Orbit seems to be the best.Btw, Toms, torrent clients shouldn't really be classified as download managers. Also, uTorrent is no longer lightweight; you should take that into consideration.[/citation]
You don't need a fast connection, all you need is not dial-up. Unless you have a really bad ISP, you shouldn't be dropping connection, so there's no real use for download managers in the way that they were useful back on dial-up.

 

[chechak]

flashget si the best

 

[merikafyeah]

Download managers (to me) are most useful for separating the download process from the browser.
This is very important as I often shutdown and restart browsers and I can't do that if there's a big download still running in the browser.

That said, Orbit is the best. It's lightweight and has a very responsive UI similar to that of utorrent 2.x.x which is something I really like as I'm using it side-by-side with utorrent 2.0.4 and the two programs are like brothers.

You can get a very cool vmware portable version of Orbit Downloader 4.1.1.2 here: http://bit.ly/Q9HP5o
That site also has a bunch of other very neat portable programs, check it out.

 

[btdude6]

It's also worth noting that FlashGot can rip raw videos/games data from most websites and also starts downloading only what's left of the video streams =]

 

[SchizoFrog]

'Download managers (to me) are most useful for separating the download process from the browser.
This is very important as I often shutdown and restart browsers and I can't do that if there's a big download still running in the browser.'

I don't know what browsers you are using but the download section of Firefox stays open if you should close the main browser. IE does the same although it downloads each file in a separate mini window rather than lumping them all together like Firefox.

I also agree that this is a bullshit article.

 

[mortsmi7]

Newsflash: If you don't live within a town, there's a high chance your still stuck on dial-up, crap-tastic satellite, or a cell card with a low cap. This is not likely to change anytime soon.

 

[beayn]

I must admit, I remove every download manager/accelerator and every toolbar and search extension from every browser of every computer I work on save for bing and google. I've never known a download manager to be legit, so I find it interesting that Tom's is posting about this and other people are actually using said download managers. Most of these things slip in with the installation of other games, apps or utilities because I'm quite sure 99.9% of my customers don't have a clue what a download manager might do for them, yet they somehow they're installed. It can usually be confirmed by asking "did you install this?" and the answer is "I didn't put that on there!", so... uninstalled.

I'll try to pay attention to the names of them to see which ones are being installed.