Accelerators

[caveman]

Do internet accelerators work or are they a gimmick.

[matty4donna]

they are normally just a gimmick or a con ;)

[paulyoung666]

dap i find is good , especially for resuming downloads ;)

[Sociable]

Originally posted by caveman
Do internet accelerators work or are they a gimmick.

Most work on tweaking network settings to maximise the use of the available bandwidth. (None actually improve the line itself)

When a user is on Win 98 or ME this can yeild improvements of up to 10% largely due to the fact the older versions of Windows are optomized for Dial-Up rather than Broadband.

The advantages of any tweaking for those using 2K or XP are far less as these are already optomized for Broadband.

Key thing is the free "tweak" programmes work as well as any so it is unlikely ever to make sense to purchase one.

The other type of accelerators are the download managers which offer other advantages like resume and scheduled downloading and use multiple connections to the same source to maximise the speed.

Again the main advantages are those for Dial-up users where resume is an essential requirement to get round the usual 2 hour timeout preventing full download of larger files.

One problem is that some servers will not allow the multiple connections to work defeating the attempt to get more than ones share from the given server.