Week 7: The Progress

In this week’s class, there were no lecture, but Puan Foziah wanted us to do the module given last week. She gave us the whole three hours to do the module. Everyone was so busy and focusing on their laptops or computers and I was one of them. Eventhough we were given three hours, it was still not enough to complete the module. There are lots more to be done.

There are softwares that really helpful in the module. For example; Internet Download Manager (IDM). It helps me to download movies, videos from the internet, programs, music, document and many more. Installing this software in my computer was one of the best things I ever done to my computers. It makes my life easier!

I want to share some of the download managers that you can get from the internet. These download managers are really useful and they are free!

Free Download Manager

This popular, free, open-source download manager speeds up the acquisition of multiple downloads by breaking the files into smaller pieces, then downloading these simultaneously. Trying it out, I found I was able to download several full-length movies in less time than it took me to find these legal downloads. In thirty minutes of dilatory browsing, using the default setting of no more than four concurrent downloads at a time, I managed to burden my hard drive with 488 megabytes' worth of material, including three full-length film classics, a dozen flash video files from YouTube, a handful of movie trailers, two music videos, and an old Mighty Mouse cartoon.

FDM will automatically resume interrupted downloads, and can download using Bittorrent in newer versions of Windows, though it will prompt you before enabling the peer-to-peer protocol. FDM will also alert you if it detects spyware or adware in a prospective download.

Orbit Downloader

It is based on p2p and multi-source downloading technology with more efficient mirrors selection algorithm for faster download. It's also devoted to the new generation web to make downloading any social media easy and fast.

Moreover, Orbit Downloader features Grab Pro to facilitate video download from sites using anti-leeching technology like YouTube, Pandora, etc. It also comes with a software updater but it might not be as good as the top pick reviewed in Best Free Software Update Monitor.

It integrates with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Maxthon, supports most streaming media protocols and file-sharing service websites, and includes other features such as general and tagged download

GetGo Download Manager

Apart from downloading various types of files, it also helps to download your favorite videos from YouTube and other websites with embedded FLV flash videos with one-click.

It integrates with IE and Firefox browsers. With the program, you can easily set up a batch download using an URL pattern template and rename downloaded files automatically using a filename pattern template. Other features such as download scheduler, resume broken downloads, managing downloaded files, etc., are included.

The program has optional Standard and Search toolbars in the user interface. Upon installation, it adds a GetGo Toolbar into your browser, but that can be disabled.

FlashGet

FlashGet download manager is also worth a try as it is designed for speed and management of downloaded files.

It increases the download speed by applying multi-server hyper-thread technology and supports HTTP, FTP, BT, eMule and other various protocols.

FlashGet provides download monitoring for Internet Explorer and also integrates well with Firefox's FlashGot extension. It supports unlimited categories for managing downloaded files.

Upon first running of the program after installation, it shows a 'recommended message' on the right panel, but that can be easily disabled.

Uget

Uget is a cross-platform program designed to be simple, lightweight and easy to use. It’s an open source application written in GTK+. Debian and RPM packages are readily available for download and installation, but for Windows users, the GTK+ runtime environment needs to install separately before running the program.

The program supports pause, resume and queue downloads, and classification of download files, monitors clipboard and integrates with Firefox browser via FlashGot plugin. Other features include batch download and import downloads from html files.

MultiGet

MultiGet is an open source and easy-to-use download manager for multi platforms including Windows and Linux. It runs on most desktops without any configuration.

The program accelerates the download by multi-tasking with multi-threading on multi servers and supports http/ftp protocols which meet the requirements of most users.

It provides management of downloaded files in a good GUI interface, monitors the clipboard well but does not integrate with browsers.

Other useful features include multi-language support, optional auto MD5 check and reconfiguring the thread number without stopping the current task.


There are more of these download managers, these are just some of them. I hope that we can put all of them to good use in our later class. I hope that these managers will make my life easier in the future.