Do these programs REALLY make the download of files quicker?
I have heard people claim that they do…but I havn’t noticed anything special.
I use download accelerator, and for me it typically makes it about double the download. I have a cable connection though.
For a 56K modem user, the only advantage is the “resume” function.
The best thing to do is to download a file from a server using regular methods and then the accelerated methods and see what kinds of throughput you receive.
I haven’t noticed GetRight making my downloads faster, but it definitely makes them more convenient, with the “resume” function and scheduled downloading (when I am at school on the network, I schedule downloads for 3-4 AM when traffic is low).
That’s right, not faster but easier with the resume & file list features. Im wary of ones that make it faster or so they say because it often alters the system registry. But there was one I saw that would open multiple connections for you to download one file, which was a novel idea.
Now that I think about it, GetRight does have “segmented downloading,” which means that if a file is available from multiple sites it will grab parts of it from each site simultaneously, thus speeding things up considerably. This, of course, only works if the file is on more than one download site.