Sunday, September 24, 2006

Need A Free Download Manager?

I've never really cared for download managers before. They always seem to get in the way, they want to start at startup, and it always seemed like too much of a hassle to configure them. It was always easier for me to pick the download destination individually and use the download manager that is included in whatever browser I happen to be using at the time.

Several months ago, I was trying to download something at work. Maybe it was a Virtual Machine of one Linux distribution or another. I honestly don't remember. All I know is that I remember it being important to me at the time, and the download kept timing out. I was starting to grow frustrated, so I decided to get a download manager. I did a web search for "Free Download Manager", and wouldn't you know it, I found one by name.

Free Download Manager has been useful to me. It wants to stay in my startup menu, but doesn't seem to suck up many resources at all. It supports multiple downloads as well as pause and resume, and it will resume a download that has timed out, which has proven valuable.

This afternoon, I finally broke down and decided to get the Windows Mobile 2005 upgrade for my HP iPaq 4700 Pocket PC. (This must be purchased and can be delivered either in a download or mailed on a CD-ROM). The download made it up to 53% but didn't seem to want to go any farther in Firefox. I decided to put Free Download Manager on my laptop and it was able to successfully download all 331 Megs of the WM 2005 installation file at once.

Of course, by the time I went through this, I ran out of time to try to do the actual upgrade, so I will have to try tomorrow.

No comments: