Living with a slow DialUp - FlashGet

There is a strange connection between all the software I am listing here. Which is at one point they have all being downloaded by FlashGet.

I have lived my best part of online life with slow dialups. The modems were saying 56Kbps but I have never saw a dial up actually reach anything more than 8kbps. Since this speed is slow and goes up and down, lines/downloads tend to drop frequently. You need a good download manager. Imagine you download a good part of a big file and if broken, you have to go and get it again. You can't remember the URL. It's complete waste of time and money. So I tested a series of download managers from those days (1997) but never came up with anything else as good as FlashGet. Some had come with spyware, some couldn't resume broken downloads, some takes up all your bandwidth but still slow and the rest had lousy interfaces.

From FlashGet version 0.96a or something it hasn't change much. When other companys' release patches for their software every other day, FlashGet was practically a solid product which I never had a problem with even if you use that early version right now.

Things I liked about FlashGet was
1. The sheer speed
2. Split downloading and resume
3. Retrieval of past downloaded URLs
4. Hung up or Shutdown when done
5. Checks if the file has been update
6. Clutter free interface
7. Tight integration with browser(IE)
8. Opera and now Firefox integration
9. Never had a corrupted file
10. That lovely blue, red and grey dotted resemblance of the file being downloading.