Microsoft Has A Download Manager. It’s Total Crap.

There were times when everything made by Microsoft (save Windows and Office, of course) was crappy. Geeks couldn’t wait to install tons of additional software on their new Windows XP machines the moment they switched them on. And then, Microsoft woke up. From each of the dozen Windows Live offerings to the Bing search engine to the incredible Security Essentials to the redesigned Paint (hell yeah!), Microsoft has been churning out one fantastic product after another of late. Today I can shamelessly claim to be using a lot of Microsoft tools besides their flagship Windows OS and Office suite.

Turns out Microsoft has a free download manager as well. We could all do with a good download manager these days. Usually you’ve a wide variety of choices available for doing anyone particular task in Windows, meaning you’re very likely to stumble upon a software that does your job without hassle. Unfortunately, that’s presently not the case with download managers. Free Download Manager, my personal favourite, has been abandoned by its developers and is being haphazardly developed by the community (which, despite being very praiseworthy, isn’t the best way to carry forward the project). Download Accelerator Plus (free version), the most popular choice out there, is bloated with ads and crap. Orbit is a useful little tool, except that its English interface is not in English. FlashGet is again very popular, but with a very wonky interface and horrible lack of options. There’s DownThemAll! for Firefox, which is, well, Firefox-only. All modern browsers (minus IE have download managers, but none of them has a download ‘accelerator’, which is a big reason people use dedicated managers after all.

Amongst all this chaos when I heard that Microsoft has a download manager of its own, I completely went nuts with joy. It was the ‘Security Essentials’ feeling all over again – Microsoft was finally stepping in to address some issues that third party developers couldn’t! However, after using the manager for about 14 seconds, I can tell you this – it’s PATHETIC. It has nothing! Sure, you can ‘copy and paste URIs starting with a http://’  . Yup. That’s it. The damn thing won’t even plug into your browsers (IE 8 included), save the lack advanced features for later.

With Microsoft Download Manager, all you have to do (and all you can do) is paste a hotlink to any file on the Internet, and the file will be downloaded for you. Seriously, you shouldn’t waste any more time reading this article or thinking about the product. It might get better in the future – I sure do hope it does – but for now it’s a huge no-no. 

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P.S. I’m not linking to the software. You may Google bing it and download it, but keep in mind that it’s totally not worth your time.

Source – NirmalTV.com