Free Download Manager 1.9

Home » Reviews » Software » Internet

Free Download Manager 1.9

Milind Bandekar, Dec 11, 2005 1010 hrs IST

Free Download Manager is a full-featured freeware download accelerator and manager.

Resumes broken/interrupted downloads, Faster download speed, Multiple-threaded download, Auto search for mirror-URLs, Scheduled download, Easy integration within the popular browsers, FREEWARE!

Can possibly corrupt downloads on crashes at times (in previous versions)

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

You are downloading a heavy file which is just about to get done with not more than few megs left and at that very moment your ISP goes down or you get disconnected. Which leaves you with the most irritating part when re-downloading the entire file from scratch is the only option. Well that's when a download manager would come in handy. From ample of freeware/shareware options to choose from, we decided to pick up Free Download Manager as our product for review. Free Download Manager according to us is one of the best download managers available as of now, which offers ample of professional functions at zero cost! Let's take a look at those.

What is FDM?

Free Download Manager (FDM) is a full-featured download accelerator and manager. It is a tool for download at an increased speed, resuming, scheduling and organizing downloads. This program will resume unfinished downloads due to lost connections, network problems, or unexpected power outages. It can connect to the Internet at a set time, download the files you want, and disconnect or shut down your computer when it's done. It's a light-weight, powerful and easy-to-use application and well known for its intuitive and user friendly interface as well. It also functions as a site manager/explorer and can easily download a list of files and whole web sites from any remote server via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. Adjustable traffic usage, multiple-threaded download, auto search for mirror-URLs and easy integration within the popular browsers, are some of the further highlights to this download manager.

Functions

Installation of FDM is simple and self explanatory and getting started is just a breeze. It integrates well within your default browser for quick access and even automates your download tasks by auto-loading downloadable links on single click, provided it is IE, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Netscape. With its high customizability, one can set it to function at various parameters depending upon the type of connectivity and usage.

This download manager works in 3 different modes - light, medium and heavy. By default, the light mode functions parallely along with browsing, by limiting the download speed such that the browsing speed is unaffected. This feature is good if you want to check your email or lookup for some info online without disconnecting the ongoing download. The medium mode ideally utilizes half of the available bandwidth for downloads, which usually is of use when browsing is not of top priority over the download. The high mode however uses the full potential of the available connectivity focusing mainly on the download. All of these modes are customizable and the users can predefine the download speed to be used for each mode from the options menu.