download accellorators: do they really work?

[Bob Weisner]

Hi:

Does anyone know if those download accellorators that are supposed to speed up download of files really work? Which one is best? Right now I am trying something called Free Download Manager. Is this program good?

Thanks,

[Jeff Sudmeier]

I have never used any download accellorators....

The biggest difference will be seen on a dail up connection. The high speed services that net zero and others offer are compression devices from what I have read and been told. Basically the page or file is compressed before it is sent to you then when you get it, it is uncompressed at your side, all automatically. HTML sees a huge improvement, things like MP3s are already so compressed that virtually no improvement is seen.

I know it is vague, but I don't know much about them :)

[Chuck Wintle]

I think download accelerators work by using cached files of the web sites you visit and only download the updated portions of that website when you revisit it.

[Andy Hoyt]

I tried this back when I was on dial up. Yup, it did speed things up, but it did so by reducing the resolution of images so much that it was immediately deemed as a total waste of time.

[Steve Clardy]

I've got a free one from my ISP provider. It shows about 6-9 % faster more of the time. But whether it actually works, I don't know. I have dialup, and it's so slow sometimes, I give up trying to load pages

[Jim Becker]

Umm...only for "static" content. These so-called "accelerators" are merely caches...they store pages either locally or at your ISP so they appear to load faster. But they DO NOT work with anything dynamic...like SMC. In some cases, they can cause problems. Your connection will NEVER be faster than it actually is... ;)

[Bob Weisner]

Thanks for all the replys! I was thinking of using it just for downloading video games.

Thanks,