Check out Tom's Guide's latest round up of download management clients.
Keeping your downloads in order is no mean feat. Whether you're just looking to keep everything organized, or you're in need of a tool that will take care of file management, batch downloading, download acceleration, and offer the ability to download of embedded FLV videos, the possibilities are endless. We've taken the trouble to round up 15 of our favorite download management and acceleration tools to help you figure out which one is best for you. Check out '15 Download Managers & Accelerators' over on Tom's Guide.
We live in an environment that's rich in media and data. Even with the broadest bandwidth, handling and organizing your downloads, whether you're grabbing media, data, or software, can still be a hassle. Here are a few download managers, accelerators, add-ons, and torrent managers that we hope will help you keep your gigabytes of data moving at a good clip and properly sorted on your computer.
Not everyone has blazing fast 100/100Mb/s connections. Not everyone has uncapped. Those who don't, can't afford to have a huge file cut out halfway through downloading.
About the managers themselves, I've tried several, and Orbit seems to be the best.
Btw, Toms, torrent clients shouldn't really be classified as download managers. Also, uTorrent is no longer lightweight; you should take that into consideration.
You don't need a fast connection, all you need is not dial-up. Unless you have a really bad ISP, you shouldn't be dropping connection, so there's no real use for download managers in the way that they were useful back on dial-up.
This is very important as I often shutdown and restart browsers and I can't do that if there's a big download still running in the browser.
That said, Orbit is the best. It's lightweight and has a very responsive UI similar to that of utorrent 2.x.x which is something I really like as I'm using it side-by-side with utorrent 2.0.4 and the two programs are like brothers.
You can get a very cool vmware portable version of Orbit Downloader 4.1.1.2 here: http://bit.ly/Q9HP5o
That site also has a bunch of other very neat portable programs, check it out.
This is very important as I often shutdown and restart browsers and I can't do that if there's a big download still running in the browser.'
I don't know what browsers you are using but the download section of Firefox stays open if you should close the main browser. IE does the same although it downloads each file in a separate mini window rather than lumping them all together like Firefox.
I also agree that this is a bullshit article.
I'll try to pay attention to the names of them to see which ones are being installed.