Sep 12 2002
Speed Download
Faster downloads are nearly mythical. Remember those ads that said, "Improve
your download speed" and were made to look like a Windows dialog box? Mac
users laughed but Windows users were suckered. That’s what I thought of when
I got a copy of Speed Download for review. I already have DSL—how much
faster can I get?
I’m now a believer! Yaz Soft has a killer product (especially if you download
large files all the time). After you install it, when you download something
in your browser, Speed Download starts and takes over. By taking over I mean
muscle it’s way through the download at blistering speed. I noticed 30% increases
on most servers and sometimes even better than that!
It works by making several paralell connections each funneling data. The server
may limit a connection to 30K/s but if you have 4 connections that’s 120K/s.
Obviously that works best with large files. There wasn’t anything I saw to make
SD kick in only when the file size was greater than a certain size but I found
a hack, just hold the option key if you don’t want SD to take over. I haven’t
tried this in Netscape but it works like a champ in IE.
If you download lots of data daily, do yourself a favor! Spend $20 and start
planning on what to do in your free time!
