This article is about the specific product called "Download Accelerator". For a download accelerator, see List of download managers.

Download Accelerator is a closed source software download manager for the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating environments.

Features

The following is a summary of Download Accelerator Plus 8.1.

Download accelerator plus or DAP is a very popular download manager with millions of users worldwide. It is completely free and can be upgraded online free of cost. It has a number of useful features like scheduled download and auto internet disconnection and\or shutting down of computer upon download completion. DAP also provides auto antivirus scanning of downloaded contents by integrating with the antivirus software (such as Norton, Mcafee or AVG) present in the OS. Though this feature may not work properly with some antivirus applications. DAP integrates very well with Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape and Opera. It pops up a small message box by the system tray with 'Open/play' commands upon completion of download. It also has a password manager for websites.

Another useful feature is that one can listen or see the preview of a song or video while download is going on. Thus it saves time and helps to stop redownloading of same content by mistake. DAP also boosts up connection speed. Along with another software called 'Speedoptimizer' (not freeware like DAP) it can increase download speed up to a large degree. DAP has a very nice and easy to learn interface.

Problems

• Has advertisements
• Although it seems to download fine from most content management systems, it has trouble with sites that do not support multi-source downloads
• Company holds software patent for multi-source file download [1]
• Sometimes DAP will not uninstall. This is known problem to SpeedBit. A known cause is uninstalling an older version of DAP and then installing a newer version of DAP, without rebooting. Then, the next reboot removes files from the newer version by accident, as they are the same name and location as the older versions files which are scheduled to be deleted. The advertisements that appear in the faulty uninstall, in Windows' Add or Remove Programs, gives off the impression the uninstall was purposely removed and replaced with ads[2]. The fix is to reinstall the newer version of DAP and then uninstall it, rebooting before and after each install and uninstall.
• The Windows 98 version seems to have exorbitantly large memory leaks. The result being that the Win 98 DAP is awfully resource intensive, forcing one to close most other running applications even on a PC with well over 256 megs of RAM.
• Buggy, can get extremely abusive to its download sources, does not respond to any HTTP error codes and keeps retrying forever

See also

• Free Download Manager
• TrueDownloader
• List of download managers
• Comparison of download managers

External links

• SpeedBit - makers of Download Accelerator

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