Free Download Manager

This is the home site of the popular Free Download Manager (FDM) software for Windows. The description says most of it, as it's free, and it's a download manager, which means that it handles your downloads instead of your browser, which is busy trying to be jack-of-all-trades. If you've done much downloading using a browser, you'll know that it can be very slow - and at present, Chrome can't even be closed if you have a download running. A download manager takes this work from the browser and handles it independently, and generally anywhere from a bit faster to considerably so, and with the opportunity to resume broken downloads too. FDM handles single URLs, lists of URLs from text files and lists of URLs copied to the Clipboard, plus it has the option of BitTorrent support. As with all good download managers, it has a Site Manager which stores your login details for every service you use, you can define file groups to suit yourself and you can specify save destinations for each or all. Other features include an optional floating "drop box", which you can simply drag and drop file URLs to, and a very handy feature which checks on the size of a single file or every file in a list before you choose to download. This saves a lot of time which would otherwise be wasted trying to download files that no longer existed or had been replaced by other error messages.

FDM also works very neatly in partnership with the Firefox Flashget extension, which allows multiple downloads to be queued directly from a page using the mouse menu, whether the target URLs are visible or hidden. Sadly there is no Flashget for Chrome as yet, because the Chrome technology isn't compatible, but you can use FDM with Firefox, IE and Chrome and it will automatically take over all your downloads if you want it to.

I've been using FDM now for at least a couple of years, probably more, and it's been almost 100% reliable for me. The only failures have been very rare incidents when it has forgotten a stored login, and that's not a huge issue. Otherwise it's been great and can be left to download tens of files quite happily without attention. If you're not happy with your current method of downloading, and do enough to warrant using a manager, this one is recommended.

WARNING: Enter this site at your own risk. I didn't get the attack site warning sign that came up with my earlier site I reviewed but my McAfee site adviser sure didn't like it. I got my warning from that so to safe rather than sorry, I'd avoid this site for any free downloads you might be looking for.