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Download Accelerator Plus

Looking for a free lunch? Kai Chandler checks out a free utility that claims to save you time and money.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch but Download Accelerator from SpeedBit comes pretty close!

Download Accelerator Plus (let’s call it DAP from here on in) is a utility to help you download files from the web. It offers two main benefits:

Resume after broken connection

Have you ever suffered a broken connection while downloading files? You may have been near the end of a two hour download. Perhaps the latest game demonstration or a new browser release only to have to reconnect and start from scratch. What a waste of time. It’s bad for the phone bill as well!

If your connection fails and you subsequently reconnect, then DAP will continue with the download by pulling down the remaining part of the file. Not all servers support the resume feature but most do. DAP tells you whether resume is operating during the download. Even if resumable downloads are not supported, DAP has a special feature called AlwaysResume that lets you resume broken downloads provided you are using a dialup connection and the file size does not exceed 10MB.

Resuming downloads is easy. Just double-click on a file which is not completed in the list - and the download will continue.

Faster connections

DAP also claims to speed downloads. It does this by first testing a number of mirror servers each of which contains the file you are trying to download. It then automatically selects one or more of the fastest servers and downloads chunks of the file in parallel from these servers. Even if no mirror is found, it initiates multiple downloads from the single server which can improve download speed.

In use, DAP couldn’t be easier. Installation integrates it with Internet Explorer 4.x/5.x and Netscape 4.x (Netscape 6.x is not supported). You can also use all other browsers with Download Accelerator, but it wouldn't be integrated with them. You will be able to use drag and drop or manually enter the URL. DAP also monitors the clipboard and is activated when you copy a URL.  If you want to download without using DAP, then you can temporarily disable it by hold down the ALT key while clicking on a hyperlink although while testing I could not get this to work.

Although it works ‘out of the box’ there’s a wealth of configuration options, for example to tell it your country. This determines the range of mirror servers it uses for downloads. You can also set options for proxy support and schedule downloads for later.

So, that’s the theory. What’s it like in practice? It certainly recovers from broken downloads very effectively. I pulled the plug on several downloads and DAP recovered from each one to complete the download. 

DAP also integrates well with AOL which uses Internet Explorer, one of the supported browsers. 

Tests results were not convincing about acceleration in download speed. Generally it was slightly faster, but sometimes it was not. There was certainly nothing like the 300% improvement SpeedBit claim. Maybe it’ll be better for you.

Despite this, it’s well worth a <download> even only for the resume feature. DAP is available as advertising supported freeware or if you find the advertisements too obtrusive you will be able register although at the moment it remains free. 

Kai Chandler