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Speed your downloads with GetRight. Review by Kai Chandler
| Product | GetRight |
|---|---|
| Company | Headlight Software |
| Web | www.getright.com Download |
| Price | $25 |
| We like | Resumable downloads, bags of features and no advertisements |
| We don't like | No - it's pretty good! |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Our recent Computing Guide looked at a number of top tips to help speed your internet connection. We recommended GetRight for several reasons but lacked space to go into any detail. So what's it all about?
Why use a download manager?
Downloading files from the web can be frustrating and slow. Imagine downloading the latest 35MB demo or patch only to find that your connection bombs out a few minutes before the end. Manageable perhaps with a fast broadband connection but if, like most of us, you are using a 56kbit/sec modem, it'll mean another overnight download.
Many servers support resumable downloads - that is, if your connection fails, and you later restart it, then the download will resume from the point it reached. You need a download tool to resume the download.
Many shareware programs and other files can be downloaded from a selection of different servers, but some will inevitably be slower than others. A download manager can poll or test the servers and select the fastest.
While downloading large files it's often faster to split the download into several simultaneous streams, perhaps from several servers. Again, this is a task that a download manager can take over for you.
GetRight
One of the most popular shareware programs is GetRight from Headlight Software. It performs all the above tasks and more.
GetRight is very easy to install and use. It adds itself into your web browser (Netscape Navigator and Microsoft IE 4.0 or higher) so starting downloads with GetRight is as easy as possible. When you select on a file to download, GetRight will take over and show its own "Save As" window and Download window.
Resumable downloads
If you need to resume the download, then you can restart GetRight and double-click the download from your download history. In tests where the download was interrupted, GetRight later resumed the download without any problem at all.
GetRight lists your download history so you can easily find and open or execute something you downloaded earlier.
Select the best server
A mirror is just another server containing an identical file set to that of the original server. You want to be sure you are using the fastest server so GetRight lets you download a current list of mirrors. When you come to download a file GetRight automatically selects the fastest and downloads from there. It does this by sending a ping or "hello" to each server and measuring the quickest to reply. There's also an option to recalculate the speeds during a download.
Segmented Downloading
GetRight splits the download into several segments to download different parts of the same file at the same time. For example, it can start at the beginning of the file from server A, and at the middle of the file from server B. Depending on your Internet connection, this can sometimes improve the download speed. Up to eight segments are supported. It's not automatic - you need to select Options when a file is downloading, and select Segmented Downloading or you can configure GetRight always to use segmented downloading.
For anyone needing to do regular downloads, for example of daily stock prices, GetRight's scheduler allows you to automate this. The date and time can be included in the filename to produce unique files.
You can configure a number of actions for GetRight to run after download. For example, it can run the downloaded program or another program. It can even send an email.
To sum up, GetRight is a fully featured download manager that will help make your downloads faster, more controllable and easy to restart if there's a glitch during the download. As it's shareware you can try before you buy but it's excellent value at $25. Download it here.
