Tom's Guide: 15 Download Managers & Accelerators

By Jane McEntegart
published

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.15 Download Managers & Accelerators

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Jane McEntegart
Topics
Software
10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • teh_chem
    What, are we back in the 90's?
    Reply
  • _Cosmin_
    I hate when they put in news link to other page where you can read the news itself.
    Reply
  • Pherule
    teh_chemWhat, are we back in the 90's?
    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.

    Reply
  • teh_chem
    PheruleNot 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.
    Reply
  • chechak
    flashget si the best
    Reply
  • merikafyeah
    Download managers (to me) are most useful for separating the download process from the browser.
    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.
    Reply
  • btdude6
    It's also worth noting that FlashGot can rip raw videos/games data from most websites and also starts downloading only what's left of the video streams =]
    Reply
  • SchizoFrog
    'Download managers (to me) are most useful for separating the download process from the browser.
    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.
    Reply
  • mortsmi7
    Newsflash: If you don't live within a town, there's a high chance your still stuck on dial-up, crap-tastic satellite, or a cell card with a low cap. This is not likely to change anytime soon.
    Reply
  • beayn
    I must admit, I remove every download manager/accelerator and every toolbar and search extension from every browser of every computer I work on save for bing and google. I've never known a download manager to be legit, so I find it interesting that Tom's is posting about this and other people are actually using said download managers. Most of these things slip in with the installation of other games, apps or utilities because I'm quite sure 99.9% of my customers don't have a clue what a download manager might do for them, yet they somehow they're installed. It can usually be confirmed by asking "did you install this?" and the answer is "I didn't put that on there!", so... uninstalled.

    I'll try to pay attention to the names of them to see which ones are being installed.



    Reply