media player/managers and download accelerators

[fatcatfan]

I've just finished reinstalling Win98SE from scratch. I'm now installing some basic apps and utilities. So far I've got:
WinTidy IrfanView with all plugins KazaaLite PowerArchiver 6.11 (the last freeware version) UltraEdit All Windows and IE Updates, including DirectX8.1 MinGW and MSYS
The only things I would like to add to that list before using Norton Ghost to backup this configuration for future reinstalls are a download accelerator and a media player/organizer. For these, I come wanting opinions. I want something free, yet without ads or spyware. For the media player, I'm considering dbPowerAmp player, but I've never used it before and I'm leery of installing it before ghosting the partition. For download managers... I'm looking at the one from freshdevices.com, but from all the ads and other things they display on their site, I'm a bit suspicious of them. In the end, I may just ghost the drive without these on it...

[MottZilla]

You might want to make sure you have certain video codecs like DivX too. I don't use Download Accelerators as they are not really all that useful, although GetRight is a nice DL program as it lets you resume.

[fatcatfan]

This poor PC can't handle DivX. Which is sad when I have a stack of CDs with DivX Farscape eps on them... someday soon I'll have a new PC... right I after I buy a house, furniture, pay off the christmas bills... ;p

As for the download accelerator, they make a significant difference on may cable connection when dl'ing large files. Many servers limit the bandwidth per connection, rather than per IP. So by pulling multiple connections, an accelerator takes full advantage of my bandwidth.

[MottZilla]

Ah. Good for you, sucks for the poor server. =(

[vegeta1215]

Mozilla and Opera have pretty cool download managers.

Before I used them I used Download Accelerator, and it was awesome. I'm not sure if it's still free though, might be ad supported.

So a clean Windows 98 install? Yuck, that's never fun. Esp if you get all the Micorsoft updates? If I had a dollar for every time I had to reboot (on average) for a 98 clean install with updates, I'd have like $20, give or take a few :)

[DsS Game]

I like the new Windows Media Player but I think its only avail for XP but im not too sure.

[Ich]

And it's also being used to stop the spread of filesharing. Isn't that wonderful! Also, FastTrack accelerator is a good thing to have with KL. It looks for more sources every specified amount of time, and clears uploads and downloads.

[fatcatfan]

Yeah, I installed all the "add-ons" with KL.

Actually, the reinstall was rather painless. The registry had grown so bloated with all the leftovers from applications I'd installed and uninstalled that Windows was really lagging. A defrag wouldn't help (Norton Speed Disk actually hung trying to defrag). Now my 200MHz Pentium 1 with Win98SE boots faster than the 1.8GHz WinXP system at work. :D And the updates went rather quickly with a cable connection...

[gdorf]

Well, I've heard great things about Flashget, a download accelerator. I believe it is free and without ads, so you may want to check it out. :)

[Matteo]

I like DAP - download accelerator plus and I strongly encourage u to try Imesh (like kazaa but much better)... it rocks my world

[Shadowblazer]

I use DAP as well. It does its job without hassling me, and that's all that I really ask for ;) Never given me any problems either, though I believe I had to disable its toolbar when I first installed it.

[fatcatfan]

Yes, prior to now I've been using DAP. It's worked fine, but I thought I'd look for something different. I'm looking at Netants right now. FlashGet used to install the Aureate spyware, and I'm not going to try the new version to find out if it still does.

As for iMesh... seems like I used that a long time ago. I stick with KazaaLite because most of the people who don't know any better use Kazaa, so I'm more likely to get hits there. I know all these gnutella networks are supposed to be connected, but it doesn't work out that way apparently.

[cap2030]

I use one called star downloader.

it's pretty good for downloads and lets you schedule downloads(never used scheduling though)

[Matteo]

i just get such slow downloads with kazaa and quick ones with imesh

[Shadowblazer]

Netants is also a great program, though I think there might be some spyware in it. Not entirely sure, but it stopped working awhile back and the only thing I can recall doing that might have affected it was to run AdAware.

[fatcatfan]

http://francis.dupont.free.fr/downloadplus/ I think that's what I'll use. It ain't pretty, but the source code can be downloaded too. I can see exactly what it's doing.