How to download files faster with GetRight

Posted on July 2, 2008 at 5:34 am

Downloading freaks like me often need to download large files. We all know that downloading large files (i.e. installers and movie files more than 10Mb) depending on your Internet speed is a lot of hassle especially when you are always on the go.

Shutting down computer or hibernating could break your Internet connection and break the download requiring you to restart the whole download process!

This type of issue is easily solved by a download software like GetRight.

Warning: depending on your Internet usage policy, you may or may not use a software like this as this could hog the bandwidth and possibly slow down other user’s Internet connection that shares the same connection. Be sure to check with your system admin in your office or your wife (depending on your organization or power structure) first before using this software.

After you are done downloading and installing the software, run it to get to the main menu:

To start downloading a file, press Control-N:

On this window you will put the location of the file that you want to download.

Put the URL of the file that you want to download, example is the the Getright installer file itself: http://download.getright.com/getright-download.exe

Click OK on the Enter URL screen and then a pop-up dialog box will ask where you want to save the files upon download:

Some options to watch out here are the priority level (First or Last in priority – translates to High or Low priority), the “Search to find file mirrors” which is very useful for downloading popular files mirrored on several servers like Linux distros, and the “Open this file when done” which does what it says – if you are downloading a music file it will play automatically right after the download.

Once you click Save, it will start downloading, the download window is intuitive with the percentage of the downloaded file:

Depending on the type of host of the file, you will see how much of the file is downloaded. There are cases when you can’t see the percentage of file already downloaded because GetRight does not know the total size of the file to download. This is not a bug but rather a common way for some file hosting servers to hide the properties of the files they host for security and performance reasons.

Batch Downloading with GetRight

The steps above covers the basic downloading process of Getright. Now for the fun part, what if we have a couple of files that we want to download simultaneously? Doing the steps for each of the files is time consuming – a much better alternative is using the Getright Browser (press Control-B or click Tools > Getright Browser:

For example, if I would like to download all the movie files from this page http://www.drfoster.f2s.com/ (this is a great website that hosts trailers, by the way, so if you like movies, I suggest you checkout this website for the latest trailers on high definition movie format) I will put this URL on the GetRight Browser:

What you will see is a catalog of files linked from that URL. The best part of this “browser” is that you can sort the files by clicking the header ala-Windows explorer:

Since my purpose is to get all of the movie files I now have a visual of all the .MOV files on that server after sorting the files by type. All we have to do now is choose the files we want and then right-click download the files to start downloading:

After that click Start Downloading (blue play button) to start the download process:

Depending on your options, you will see multiple windows downloading files concurrently:

Some of you will be frowning now, you might say you can do that multiple download stuff with Firefox or even IE but we are not done yet, there is more and this where GetRight really excels: the Accelerated Downloading – it means it will download the file using multiple segments using multiple connections to the same location. To enable this feature click Options > Accelerated (Segmented) Downloading > then choose the number of segments, in this case choose four:

The free trial version supports up to 4 segments. You will see that there are 4 segments:

With segmented downloading my file now has a 99.5K/sec (Kilobits per second) which is a huge gain from 53.2K/sec with no segmented downloading. In theory, this means you will save about half the time to download the file compared with downloading it the normal way.

Pause Downloading

What if you need to go and want to resume downloading when you get online on another time? Just hit Pause!

When you want to resume just click resume:

Note: this is applicable only for servers that allow resume-able downloads. You will have no choice but to restart the whole download process if you download from non-resumable file servers.

Now that we got the basics covered here are more ideas that you might find this software useful:

Downloading a whole webpage for offline browsing: just open the GetRight Browser and download everything!
Finding hidden links, for cases when a webpage has a link that you can’t see with your ordinary browser (i.e. the font is colored white on a white background) either by mistake or intentionally done by the web maker (i.e. Easter eggs). You can do this too by looking at the HTML source code but we won’t go into that here.
Automatically turning off your computer or disconnecting the dial connection once download is finished for those really long overnight downloads. You can configure GetRight to do this on the main menu.
Downloading only files that changed. GetRight’s server synch tool let’s you synch on a website and it scans the whole website for files that changed so you will only get the most recent updates.

By the way, GetRight is a shareware so it is not free. Please don’t be like me – pay the guy if you like the software to get more features enabled and also get free updates. The cheapest version is $19.95 with one year upgrades. For more advanced and demanding users you might want to look at GetRight Pro which supports even more features like uploading: http://pro.getright.com/compare.html

Ben Carigtan is a new contributor writer. A Software Engineer with more than 7 years of technical experience, he will be writing articles covering practical advices and tips for computer users.

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One Response to “How to download files faster with GetRight”

FlashGet - Free Internet download manager Says:

[...] is similar to GetRight, another excellent download manager for Windows. If you’re a Firefox user, check out my previous post on five download manager add-ons for [...]
August 6th, 2009 at 5:32 am