VisualWGet

[migo]

http://visualwget.blogspot.com

I like my programs lean and efficient whenever possible. wget.exe was this, in addition it had a bunch of features I never needed to use. It was also a bit annoying to have to launch command prompt, type wget.exe the URL (which would have to either be entered manually or via the paste function through the top left box in command prompt because Ctrl+V doesn't paste inside the command prompt). I was looking to get a program that would hook wget into IE and take over downloads from IE, as IE's biggest annoyance is saving to the temp directory, and when the download is complete transferring it to the desired directory (why can't it just do it directly?).

I've only ever used wget.exe to download files directly, I haven't used any of the more advanced features, so even though they're more available in VisualWGet, I won't be going into those - since it's a beta it might even be that they don't work.

VisualWGet has a simple GUI, it reminds me of uTorrent. Configuration options outside of the wget switches are pretty basic. You can set the max number of downloads. You can move a download up or down the que. You can start a new download (pasting the URL), you can edit a download (changing switches, main advantage I guess would be changing the download directory), and you can remove it.

Getting it to hook into IE was fairly easy. I followed the instructions on the website, initially it didn't work, but after restarting IE a couple times, and running the RegisterBrowserExt.exe in an elevated command prompt it worked.

Download information is more detailed than anything I've seen, it gives download rates every 1/10 of a second or thereabouts, it also has a quickly fluctuating estimated donload time. This is rather normal in download managers, but I'd really prefer one where it predicts one based on the average download rate up to the given point.

It doesn't have any features (that I'm aware of), for automatically searching the web for additional download sources so it can combine a file it downloads from 6 different servers, so download speeds will be limited by the connection you have to the one server you initially download from.

CPU usage wise, both VisualWget.exe and wget.exe are running at 5-10% each. Memory usage seems constant with wget.exe at 800K, and VisualWget.exe at 18,864K I'm running a 700MB ISO download, so the memory usage might be proportional to the download size - it jumped up to 28MB when I looked at the history log of the download rates, which given that it gives reports multiple times per second, and was going for over 30 minutes, is going to be a lot of data. It's not quite as memory efficient as I'd like, but I'm not noticing a performance hit from it so it's acceptable.

It does the job of handling downloads for IE very nicely, and given the nature of the program, while memory usage might be a bit high, it doesn't have any bloat. It has a diverse feature set from wget but that doesn't bog the program down for simple use.