Downloading very large files over the Internet can test your patience. Even with a 10 Mbps broadband connection, for example, downloading a 480MB game demo file can take over 3 hours. What's even worse, if the broadband connection is reset halfway, you will have to start all over again.

This is where a download manager can help. A download manager is a computer program that allows you to download very large files quickly over the Internet while optimising bandwidth usage so that your browsing experience will not be affected.

Examples of download managers include Aria, ConnectFusion, Download Accelerator Plus, Go!Zilla and many more. Some download managers are optimised for a certain function. For example, Offline Explorer is designed to download entire web sites. Others, such as Go!Zilla, are adware applications, displaying a banner ad in the user interface.

Benefits of Using a Download Manager

One of the key benefits of using a download manager is that it allows you to pause during the download or resume if the connection is broken midway, saving you from having to start all over again.

If there are several possible mirror sites to download a file from, the download manager will handle the different connections to various sites in order to download the same file more quickly.

Another advantage of the download manager is that it enables you to automate many of the processes involved. For example, it can automatically browse a site and download content based on your specifications (for instance, according to file type, or depending on whether it is an updated version of the specified file). You can also set it to perform downloads according to a specified schedule, or to perform recursive downloads so that you will always have a mirror copy of the target file.

How It Works

If you use a regular browser to download a file, the speed will be limited by the maximum download bandwidth of the server connection. What a download manager does is to "break up" the large file into smaller segments so that they can be downloaded simultaneously using multiple connections. When the download manager obtains all the segments, it will reassemble the original file that was requested.

The Lab Report

To demonstrate a download manager in action, we used a popular download manager, Speedbit's Download Accelerator Plus, to download a 480MB game demo from a server hosted in the United States. Download Accelerator Plus is available free as adware.

According to the SpeedBit web site (www.speedbit.com), the use of Download Accelerator Plus can result in a 400 per cent improvement in performance. In our own lab tests, we also found significant improvements in downloading speeds.

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