Ok how useful are these so called download managers who promise excellent download speeds and fast downloads . Well the basic facts of downloads being that what ever software you may load the download speed is judged by the speed of your network connection . Then the question is how do software like Flashget or getright help me . Easy , they cache the information about the site from where the download starts and in the case a connection is broken they can reconnect at a later stage and pick up the download from where it got left out .The reason why we find it apparently faster than the IE downloads or downloads from the browser is because of the process itself . Downloads from a browser will involve the browser executable to take up processor time and spawn seperate processes. Finally the executable in question is the browser itself . You start a download and then go on browsing sites so since the executable now has to do 2 things all of a sudden it slows down . Third party software are seperate executables and spawn seperate processes so they are slightly faster . The other reason is that software like Flashget block some amount of network bandwidth for their use , this again helps in slightly speeding up the download times .
The browsers also try to download a file as a whole while these software split the files up for easier downloads.
That was as far as the technical description went . Now for the software to use . I have found flashget to be extremely user friendly and easy to operate . Eventhough I work as an IT professional I somehow found that I almost required a PHd to operate getright. OVerall going by the current internet trend as well , I would rate Flashget over its rivals