Solution for Slow download speed of MSDN

Hi guys.

Last month I got a MSDN account and I was trying things. But when I try to download a software from MSDN, it was hilariously slow. I thought may be it was my internet connection as at home I got a poor 512kbps (Not 512KBps) line. Then I tried downloading the same software at university which had over 3MBps line but the result was the same. I never got more than 60KBps. And the worst part was sometimes the download got corrupted after downloading 60% - 80% of the file which made me really angry. 

May be most out of you guys must have experienced it. So I dig a little and on MSDN forums I found a solution. It was "Microsoft File Transfer Manager". You can find more information about it here.

I download it. Installed it. and again got confused. How do I use it?...

Normally all my downloads are done through the "Internet Download Manager", which is a super awesome piece of software. I removed browser integration for Internet Explorer (You can do this in the options of IDM). Then I went to MSDN site via Internet Explorer and tried to download a software and it automatically redirected to FTM (File Transfer Manager).

And finally it got started to download. The transfer rate of download was jaw dropping (was maximum of the connection).

So if you were fed up with the slow transfer rate of MSDN download, I think this is the solution. One thing to note was when you directly download a software, you don't have pause/resume capability. But with FTM you have that. Also I download few big size software and none of them crashed during the download.

And one more thing. I tried this with Internet Explorer. So if any of you try with Firefox or Chrome, please drop me the results and the procedure you followed. I'll share it with the community.


2 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I tried with the solution you provided.
    When i try to download any software via msdn from internet explorer it isn't redirecting me to FTM.
    Is there anything else you did after installing FTM?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Nikki. If you are using > IE9 you need to use emulation to emulate IE9: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2900662

    ReplyDelete