Sunday, February 15, 2004

Download Manager Reloaded – XI NetTransport (free)

Do you download often a lot of files from the internet? Do you wish you could control how many downloads are active at one time? Do you wish to limit the download speed so you can still surf the internet while downloading? What you need is a download manager.

XI NetTransport (XINT) from http://www.xi-soft.com/default.htm is a download manager which simply makes downloading easier. Of course, there are many other (and more well-known) download managers available but from my point of view I never came across something better than XINT.

First of all, it can monitor downloads inside Internet Explorer so each time a download starts XINT is loaded and will execute the download. The first advantage you get from this: You can limit how many jobs should be active inside XINT (Tools -> Connection -> Max. Jobs). This way, you can easily click on all download links and XINT will execute them one after another. Also, XINT can be configured to store all downloads in a specified folder, no more “Where do you want to save the file” questions IE normally triggers.

And best of all, you can specify a speed limit (Tools -> Connection -> Speed) which allows you to continue to surf the internet while downloading without being bothered by your internet connection being at 100 utilization. For example, if you have a DSL connection with one megabit downstream, your download speed is at about 90 Kbytes per second. Simply set the Speed Limit to 30 Kbytes and activate Tools -> Obey Speed Limit inside XINT. This leaves 60 Kbytes for normal surfing.

A special feature I like much is that you can configure an unlimited number of proxy servers and XINT can transfer one download using different proxy servers at once. For example, some sites limit your speed by simply checking your IP address. That way, you will never exceed their limit of, let’s say, 8 Kbytes. When you download using different proxy servers, each connection has a different IP address (since it’s the address of the proxy) and thus you have a multiple of 8 Kbytes. Okay, some webmaster are likely to kill me for this but its cool anyway.

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