Get It On Down, Right! (Getright)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	Getright
Date:	04/11/00 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Resume, queue & schedule downloads

Disadvantages: Free version displays ads, £15ish to register

Where I would be without GetRight, I don’t know – it’s a must have companion to your web browser!

>What is it?
-GetRight is a really nifty tool for downloading things from the net, it makes it a million times easier than using the basic Internet Explorer download option

>What so good about it?
-There are two really good points about GetRight which in themselves make it a must have, these are…
- It can continue a download after you’ve been disconnected, gone to bed or whatever.
- It will queue up downloads ready to be downloaded at a later date.

>And the other features?
- GetRight will display progress bars for each download in progress, you even have the option for GetRight to ‘tell’ you when downloads complete, start or whatever!
- You can give different downloads different priorities, thus important downloads you can give a higher priority & thus they will be downloaded first.
- You can pause, stop & start as many or as few downloads as you want or set automatic downloading (e.g. all files are downloaded according to priority & limits).
- You can set limits to the number of files that can be downloaded at any one time and/or from any one server.
- GetRight has the ability to perform segmented downloading. This means that you can download bits of a file from several different locations, which, if the servers are really slow (i.e. only comes down at 1k/sec), will speed up the time taken to download the file. In practice, unless you have some super speed ASDL connection or similar, you’re very unlikely to ever need this ability.
- It can categorise you downloads (if you have a lot queued up), e.g. pictures, compressed files etc. which you can give a different default location to download to. Again, not of that much use unless you are a seriously heavy downloader!
- You can set-up daily downloads. This is in theory a good idea, but in pra
ctice, all the downloads I can think of that you need daily / weekly or whatever cannot be setup to come down daily because the filename changes. E.g. virus checker update files.
- GetRight can often get around anti-download schemes (i.e. where the site try’s to prevent you from downloading files) & can even process ‘broken’ or ‘dodgy links’ to find the file to download. Not of that much use to the average user though!
- You can override GetRight downloading by holding down the shift key when you press a download link or force GetRight to download something which isn’t normally downloaded (e.g. a web graphic) by holding down Ctrl-Alt & clicking the object.

>Advanced features – for the hardcore downloader!?
- GetRight can be setup, to start /stop downloading at a certain time, hang up when done or even turn your computer off when finished!! Used together, this is very handy if you have off-peak free access & want to download a very big file during free time only!
- You can specify a download speed limit (this does not appear to work for me!) and limits on how many files can be downloaded at once, and in addition limits from each server (split into HTTP / FTP categories).

>How does it work, what does it need?
-GetRight works by intercepting your clicks on download links and works with either Microsoft Explorer or Netscape Navigator. You can start a download via GetRight itself by manually typing in a URL (download link), but I doubt you’d want to do that! GetRight even has it’s own built in browser, but, to put it mildly, it’s cr*p!

>Come on then, what are the bad points???!
-Ok there a few problems with GetRight, but the average user will probably never come across them…
- Segmented downloading is often unreliable, when I’ve tried it, it often crashes.
- Not really a bad point about GetRight, but a point never the less; some sit
es do not support download resuming. This is only a small fraction of sites though, the vast majority and the ones your most likely to use do support resuming.
- GetRight can’t seem to download from a certain ‘webspace’ sites like Xoom. For techies & the brave, this can be solved by going into the menu: ‘Configuration’, ‘Advanced’, ‘More’ and under ‘Protocols’, changing the ‘’HTTP/User Agent’ to ‘Mozilla/4.0[compatible;MSIE 5.0; Windows 98]’.
- Speed limit option doesn’t work for me. I tried limiting the downloads to 2k/sec so I could still browse at a reasonable pace, but downloads still came down using all the bandwidth – bummer! Perhaps just my set-up?
- Trying to get automatic redialling when disconnected to actual work properly is a bit of a feat!
- It’s not very reliable at restarting downloads after you’ve been cut-off, most of the time it works, but on many occasions I’ve left it to auto-redial & restart downloading only to come back & find loads of ‘broken links’ and a connection that’s been on for the past hour doing nothing! Serves me right for trying to download loads of MP3’s I suppose!

>And you get it from at a cost of…?
- GetRight is available from, yep you guessed it…www.getright.com!
- GetRight is free if you don’t mind a few ads being displayed in the download window (which you don’t have to have open). Otherwise it costs $20 (about £15) to register, worth it only if you use it a lot or really want to get rid of the ads.

The Verdict?
-A must have for the frequent downloader and, for the occasional downloader, well, get the free version at least – it’s far better & more reliable than the built in download option. There is nothing worse than downloading a big update, only for it to fail half way through!



Thanks for reading, hope this is of use to you, if so let me know – if not, tell me why!
Tobes

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